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Thou West that gave'st him to us

About This Item

  • Title: Thou West that gave'st him to us
  • Date: 1865
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: loc.07461
  • 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 consists of draft lines of a poem never published in Whitman's lifetime. An elegy for Abraham Lincoln, the poem does not share lines or specific imagery with Whitman's most famous elegy, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," or the other poems in the cluster "Memories of President Lincoln." The manuscript was probably written in the spring of 1865, shortly after Lincoln's death in April.
  • Related Item(s):
    • On the back of this leaf 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. See loc.00051.
    • See wwa.00169.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Thou West that gave'st him to us." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 19 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: loc.07461.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 verso] Thou West that gave'st him to us Thou gavest him to us, Land, Thou, That ^for our sake, rear'dst him in on thy fresh & ample prairies,  
 and on the breasts of thy great, fresh,  
  musical flowing rivers; This day we return to thee his with bearing his body.   [begin leaf 1 recto]
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