Content:
On one light blue Williamsburgh tax blank (21.5 x 12 cm), in dark brown ink, with
revisions in fine pen and pencil. Whitman penciled in a question mark, in
parentheses, next to the title. With the addition of the new first line "O love!"
this became section 27 of "Calamus" in 1860. In the 1867
Leaves
it was retitled "O
Living Always—Always Dying!" Whitman next transferred it to the "Passage to India" supplement
bound in with
Leaves
, where it
reappeared in 1876; in the 1881
Leaves
Whitman permanently added it to the cluster "Whispers of Heavenly Death."
Content:
Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from
Leaves of Grass
, stitched and tied with
ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages
numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written
entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections
and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are:
"Whispers of Heavenly
Death,"
"Yet, Yet Ye Downcast
Hours,"
"As Nearing
Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws
Nigh"), "Darest
Thou Now O Soul,"
"Of Him I Love Day and
Night,"
"Quicksand Years That Whirl
Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"),
"That Music Always
Round Me,"
"As If a Phantom Caress'd
Me,"
"O Living Always, Always
Dying,"
"Here, Sailor!"
(later published as "What
Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider,"
"To One Shortly to
Die,"
"Joy, Shipmate,
Joy!,"
"This Day, O Soul,"
"What Place is
Besieged?,"
"The Last
Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."
