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Fancies at Navesink

About This Item

  • Title: Fancies at Navesink
  • Date: Between about 1885 and 1888
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: yal.00039
  • 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: Dating this manuscript is difficult. Many of the poems listed belong to the eight-poem sequence "Fancies at Navesink," which was published first in Nineteenth Century in August 1885. If one concludes that Whitman imagined the arrangement outlined here before the initial publication of the poems, then he probably wrote this manuscript in the first half of 1885, before he submitted "Fancies for Navesink" and "After the Supper and Talk" to Henry M. Alden of Harper's (they were rejected). If, however, this list represents Whitman's ordering of poems for a cluster in a separate volume, like November Boughs (1888), then this manuscript could have been written between 1885 and 1888. The poems were never published in the order outlined in the manuscript.
  • Notes written on manuscript: On leaf 1 recto, in unknown hand: "(This was pasted on wrapper)"
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Fancies at Navesink." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 18 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: yal.00039.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]

  • Fancies at Navesink

  • 1
  • After the Supper and Talk
  • You lingering sparse leaves of me
  • Ah not that granite dead & cold
  • published
  • You tides with ceaseless swell & ebb
  • 2 Last of ebb & daylight waning
  • 3 Proudly the flood comes in
  • 4 With every heaving wave—
  • 5 For last of all
  • Fancies at Navesink
  • The Pilot in the mist
  • Had I the choice
  • Ah, not this g
(This was pasted on wrapper)   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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