Content:
On one leaf of pink paper (21.5 x 13 cm), in black ink, with a fair copy of the
poem at the bottom of the leaf and a deleted draft featuring heavy revisions in
the same ink and in pencil at the top. This poem was originally numbered 68, and
its title was "Leaflet—." In
1860 it became the second numbered verse paragraph of section 31 of "Calamus." In 1867 Whitman split
up the two paragraphs and made them separate poems; these verses were moved to a
position between the "Calamus"
and a "Leaves of Grass"
cluster and permanently retitled "What Place Is Besieged?" In 1881 the poem was transferred to the
cluster "Inscriptions."
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."
