Content:
The lines, deleted with a single pencil stroke, appear after revision and
expansion to have eventually formed part of section 21 of the cluster "Calamus" in the 1860
edition of
Leaves of Grass
; in
the 1867 edition this section received the title "That Music Always Round Me."
Content:
On two leaves of pink paper, both 21 x 13 cm, in black ink, with minor revisions
in the same ink. Pinholes mostly in center and at top of both pages. This poem
became section 21 of "Calamus"
in 1860; the lines on the first manuscript page became verses 1-6, and those on
the second ("I hear not the volumes of/ sound merely—...") became 7-9. Retitled
"That Music Always Round
Me" in 1867, it was transferred in 1871 to the "Whispers of Heavenly Death"
cluster in
Passage to India.
In
1881 Whitman incorporated it, with the rest of the cluster, in the main body of
Leaves
.
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."
