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Yet far sweeps your road

About This Item

  • Title: Yet far sweeps your road
  • Date: 1864
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: hpl.00001
  • Source: Huntington Public Library, Huntington, New York. Transcribed from digital images of the original. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This is a draft of the poem eventually titled "Thick-Sprinkled Bunting," first published under the title "Flag of stars, thick-sprinkled bunting" in Drum-Taps in 1865. The manuscript was likely written in 1864.
  • Related Item(s):
    • On the back of this leaf is a letter draft from around 26–29 (?) December 1864, apparently to the editor of the New York Herald, asking that an accompanying "communication," now lost, be printed "to start a public demand for the general exchange of prisoners of war."
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Yet far sweeps your road." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 09 June 2026. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: hpl.00001.xml (TEI)

Key

Textual Feature Appearance
Overwritten brown with strikethrough
Added inline purple with double underline
Uncertain gray with wavy underline
Supplied from another source turquoise with brackets
Metamark green with triple underline
Long deletion gray background with top and bottom border
  [begin leaf 1 recto] ^ Yet far sweeps your road path, O O your path stretches far Martial constellation! far sweeps your stretches far your journey ever adding group!  
 journey! For O the prize I see at issue is the  
 world; All its ships and shores I see  
 interwoven with your threads,  
 spotted cloth flag; Dream'd again the flags of kings,  
 highest borne, to wave waft fly flaunt unrivall'd? O destined hasten blue and silver! O with sure and  
 steady step, passing highest flags  
 of kings. Walk supreme to the heavens, mighty  
 symbol—run up above them  
 all, Dense starr'd bunting O your path stretches far, martial O to find your lazy seams, they  
 can turn and flap for carnage O far, long, long your road,   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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