Great is life...and real and mystical...wherever and whoever, Great is death...Sure as life holds all parts together, death holds all parts together;… - Walt Whitman

Sure as Life holds all parts together, Death holds all parts together.

I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband — I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid — I see these sights on the earth; 5
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny — I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea — I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these — All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.

O Banner!
Not houses of peace are you, nor any nor all of their prosperity; if need be you shall have every one of those houses to destroy them;
You thought not to destroy those valuable houses, standing fast, full of comfort, built with money;
May they stand fast then? Not an hour, unless you, above them and all, stand fast.

With the sentiment of the stars and moon such nights I get all the free margins and indefiniteness of music or
poetry, fused in geometry's utmost exactness.