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It were unworthy a live

About This Item

  • Title: It were unworthy a live
  • Date: Before or early in 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: duk.00162
  • Source: Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. 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 is an early scrap of prose that may have contributed to the poem that eventually became "Song of Myself." The last part of the manuscript recalls what ultimately became section 32, in which Whitman describes wanting to "live awhile with animals" because "[t]hey do not sweat and whine about their condition, / They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins." These lines were present in the first version of the poem in 1855, so it seems likely that the manuscript dates to before or early in that year.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "It were unworthy a live." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 14 February 2026. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: duk.00162.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]

It is ^wh were unworthy a live man to pray or complain, no matter what ^should happens.—Will he be a ^descend among those rhymsters and sexless priests, and of clean shaved virtue, whose vast virtues isare lathered and shaved three times a week,—to whine how and weep about sin and hell and—to call pronounce his race a sham or swindle—to squall out

  [begin leaf 1 verso]
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