To the States
To Identify the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, or Eighteenth Presidentiad
Why reclining, interrogating? Why myself and all drowsing?
What deepening twilight! Scum floating atop of the waters!
Who are they, as bats and night-dogs, askant in the Capitol?
What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your
Arctic freezings!)
Are those really Congressmen? Are those the great Judges? Is that the
President?
Then I will sleep a while yet—for I see that these States sleep, for
reasons.
With gathering murk—with muttering thunder and lambent shoots, we all duly
awake, South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will
surely awake.
Notes
1 These were the three Presidentships of Polk; of Taylor, succeeded by Fillmore; and of Pierce;—1845 to 1857.