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Beat! beat! drums!

About This Item

  • Title: Beat! beat! drums!
  • Date: 1861
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: loc.00051
  • Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from The Walt Whitman Archive I: Whitman Manuscripts at the Library of Congress, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Garland, 1993), 1:156. The transcription was then checked against 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 a draft of "Beat! Beat! Drums!" which was first published simultaneously in Harper's Weekly and the New York Leader on September 28, 1861. The manuscript was probably written in the summer of 1861 during the early days of the conflict, shortly before the poem's publication.
  • Related Item(s):
    • On the back of this leaf are draft lines of a poem never published in Whitman's lifetime, probably written in the spring of 1865, shortly after the death of Abraham Lincoln. See loc.07461.
    • See wwa.00169.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Beat! beat! drums!." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 18 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: loc.00051.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] 1 Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow! Through the windows—through every door—burst in like a  
 force of armed men [illegible] Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation, Into the school where the scholar is studying; Leave not the bridegroom any in quiet—no happiness ^must he have now with his bride; Leave not Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field,  
 or gathering his crops, grain, So strong you beat fierce you whirr and pound, you drums—So long and shrill you  
 bugles blow.   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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