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Certainties, Faith, Counterbalances, Alternation

About This Item

  • Title: Certainties, Faith, Counterbalances, Alternation
  • Date: About 1887 or 1888
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: loc.00075
  • 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), 1:175. 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 is a draft of "Continuities," a poem published first in the New York Herald on March 20, 1888. It was likely written around 1887 or 1888, shortly before the poem was published.
  • Related Item(s):
    • On the back of this manuscript is an undated letter to Whitman from Talcott Williams. The letter has been crossed out, probably by Whitman.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Certainties, Faith, Counterbalances, Alternation." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 19 April 2026. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: loc.00075.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]

Certainties, Faith  
 Counterbalances,  
 Alternation

The body ^sluggish, old, The fires in em embers left of earlierfires The frozen winter clods——but —to them the spring shall come And heads With grass and leaves flowers and summer branches green fruits and corn The sun is ^now sinking low in the west de Shall rise again to morning and to noon The light in the eye grows dim—the body blood all sluggish, old Appearances   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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