THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,)

To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane,

Thou ship of air that never furl’st thy sails,

Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,

At dusk that look’st on Senegal, at morn America,

That sports amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,

In them, in my experience, had’st thou my soul,

What joys! what joys were thine!

Walt Whitman, ‘To The Man-of-War Bird’ (14-21) in Whitman/Leaves