Content:
One leaf made by pasting together two scraps of pink paper, probably
wrappers from the 1855 edition of
Leaves of Grass.
This manuscript contains approximately
four poetic lines, written and revised in ink, about the 1833 Leonid meteor shower. It is possible that these lines are related to the poem "Year
of Meteors. (1859–1860)," although other than a mention of meteors and the description of them as "dazzling," the subject of the manuscript seems to have little to do with the subject of the poem, which is mostly about the portents of the Civil War. "Year of Meteors" was first published in
Drum-Taps
(1865).
Richard Maurice Bucke's transcription of these lines in
Notes and Fragments
(1899) begins
with another version of these lines and an additional line following
them. It is possible that these lines were present on the manuscript
when he made his transcription but have since been cut off, though it is
also possible that Bucke combined transcriptions from separate leaves.
The now-absent final line of Bucke's transcription reads, "Such have I
in the round house hanging—such pictures name I—and they are
but little." If indeed Whitman wrote this line as part of the present
manuscript, it would connect it with the early poem "Pictures," unpublished during Whitman's
lifetime. Given the use of the 1855 wrapper paper, this was likely composed between late 1855 and 1860. On the reverse side, made up of two different scraps are the trial title "Poem of the Trainer," (loc.06005) which is written in ink, and several
fragmentary lines written in pencil (loc.07550), describing a whale hunt and likely related to "Song of Joys".
