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By thine own lips, O Sea

About This Item

  • Title: By thine own lips, O Sea
  • Date: 1883
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: yal.00014
  • Source: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 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 a draft of the poem "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!," first published in Harper's Monthly Magazine in March 1884. The back of the manuscript leaf is letterhead with an illustration of the Sheldon House, Ocean Grove, New Jersey. Whitman visited Ocean Grove, New Jersey, with John Burroughs for a week in late September and early October 1883. This draft was probably composed at the time of the visit or shortly thereafter.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "By thine own lips, O Sea." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 22 December 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: yal.00014.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 thine own lips, O Sea

By thine own lips, O Sea, By As where day and night I wander on here on the beach To get Counting the tally of the surf‑suggestions wordless utterance of these liquid wordless tongues And To pass within my soul, which loves the  
 grim, mysterious, wordless story, That This haughty‑husky utterance of the sea—  
 —that this unsubduedness, That Thisy cosmic, ever‑latent voice of power, refusal With The lengthened swell, and The irrepressible rage, and the ^these emblems  
 many tears;—these emblems, Some vast heart, like a planet's, chained  
 and chafing there here, Some primitive right withheld—some freedom‑lover  
 pent—some tyranny; Within, within and deep, ^by thee by day and night, ^by thine own tongue lips O SeaO Sea! Surely some This chanted tale of elemental passion, With undertone of muffled lion roar, And skreel of whistling wind, and hiss of spray, Thisy Thy A The chanted chanted tale of elemental passion,  
 —thisy haughty husky utterance Thisy tale of subterranean toil and wrongs  
  Unf For once Seems here Cconfided to me * To pass within my soul the  
 wordless lesson Of all that power means Of freedom, action, [no handwritten text supplied here] in husky-haughty   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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