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By day the distant

About This Item

  • Title: By day the distant
  • Date: October 1883
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: loc.00009
  • Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 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 manuscript is likely an early draft of "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!" a poem published first in Harper's Monthly, March 1884. The manuscript was probably written in October, 1883. It is written on the inside of an envelope, opened up, that bears the address "Mr. Walt Whitman, Camden, New Jersey." The postmarks on the verso are dated October 11 and 12, 1883, and Whitman's visit to Ocean Grove, New Jersey, in September and October of 1883 was the inspiration for the poem.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "By day the distant." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 16 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: loc.00009.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] By day the distant, ? shadowy  
 sails, the steamers' pennant  
 trails of smoke Some vast soul, like a planet's,  
 bound, arrested, tied, Watching the distant, shadowy sails,  
 the My sight and senses given to  
 to thee—the —thy ? saline smell odor, They distant shadowy sails—the  
 steamers' pennant-trails of  
 smoke, The flying soaring gull hawks and flocks   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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