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The Voice of the Rain

About This Item

  • Title: The Voice of the Rain
  • Date: August 1885
  • Creator(s): Anonymous
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.00034
  • Source: Outing 6 (August 1885): 570. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm copy of an original issue. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the periodical poems, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Contributors to digital file: Elizabeth Lorang April Lambert Susan Belasco
  • Cite this page: Anonymous,. "The Voice of the Rain." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 26 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.00034.xml (TEI)
per.00034.001per.00034.001_cropped

THE VOICE OF THE RAIN.1

AND who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower, Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated: I am the Poém of Earth, said the voice of the rain, Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea, Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely formed, altogether changed, and yet the same, I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe, And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn, And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, and make pure 
  and beautify it: (For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfillment, wandering, Recked or unrecked, duly with love returns.) Walt Whitman.

Notes

1. Reprinted in Leaves of Grass (1897). [back]

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