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Notes where wild bees flitting hum

About This Item

  • Title: Notes where wild bees flitting hum
  • Date: About 1880
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: loc.00111
  • 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), 2:624; and Major American Authors on CD-Rom: Walt Whitman (Westport, CT: Primary Source Media, 1997). 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 was likely written around 1880 as Whitman was drafting the poem "A Clear Midnight," first published in Leaves of Grass in 1881. The manuscript consists of two drafts of lines unpublished in Whitman's life, but which appeared in other manuscript drafts with lines that were published as "A Clear Midnight." The lines that appear in this manuscript were published posthumously as part of a poem titled "Supplement Hours." In 1897, five years after Whitman's death, his literary executors added a group of poems entitled "Old Age Echoes" to a new printing of Leaves of Grass, and "Supplement Hours" was a part of this group.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Notes where wild bees flitting hum." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 26 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: loc.00111.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] Notes where the wild bees flitting hums Or the August silent mMulleins grow . . . . or [illegible] winter  
 Snow flakes fall . . . While the ever the far off Stars ^of heaven roll round and round . . . Where the As Notes as the wild bBees flitting hum . . . As Or August mMulleins grow ... as or winter Snow-flakes  
 silent fall . . . Ans Or the Stars in the sky roll round . . .   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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