THE WHITE HOUSE
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| Walt Whitman le Thomas Wilmer Dewing | |
(A found poem, extracted from the prose by Walt Whitman)
I wander about a good deal,
sometimes at night under the moon.
Tonight took a long look at the President's house.
The white portico —
the palace-like, tall, round columns,
spotless as snow
— the walls also —
the tender and soft moonlight,
flooding the pale marble,
and making peculiar faint languishing shades,
not shadows —
everywhere a soft transparent hazy,
thin, blue moon-lace, hanging in the air —
the brilliant and extra-plentiful clusters of gas,
on and around the facade, columns, portico,
— everything so white, so marbly pure
and dazzling, yet soft
— the White House of future poems,
and of dreams and dramas,
there in the soft and copious moon —
the gorgeous front,
in the trees, under the lustrous flooding moon,
full of reality, full of Illusion —
the forms of the trees, leafless, silent,
in trunk and myriad angles of branches,
under the stars and sky —
the White House of the land,
and of beauty and night —
sentries at the gates, and by the portico,
silent, pacing there in blue overcoats —
stopping you not at all,
out eyeing you with sharp eyes,
whichever way you move.
