Whispers of Heavenly Death | Whitman Archive

Whitman Archive Title: Whispers of Heavenly Death
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00323
Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839-1919, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Box: 30
Folder: Whispers of Heavenly Death (1870). A.MS. and printed copy.
Series: Literary File
Date: about 1870
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 15 leaves, 20 x 13 cm, handwritten
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Content: Mostly mounted clippings of poems taken from Leaves of Grass , stitched and tied with ribbon by Walt Whitman. An autograph title page is followed by pages numbered in red pencil 469-484. One poem, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," on p. 481 is written entirely in Walt Whitman's hand (see image 23), and other corrections and additions are in Whitman's hand throughout. The poems included are: "Whispers of Heavenly Death," "Yet, Yet Ye Downcast Hours," "As Nearing Departure" (later published, in a different form, as "As the Time Draws Nigh"), "Darest Thou Now O Soul," "Of Him I Love Day and Night," "Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither" (later published as "Quicksand Years"), "That Music Always Round Me," "As If a Phantom Caress'd Me," "O Living Always, Always Dying," "Here, Sailor!" (later published as "What Ship Puzzled at Sea"), "A Noiseless Patient Spider," "To One Shortly to Die," "Joy, Shipmate, Joy!," "This Day, O Soul," "What Place is Besieged?," "The Last Invocation," and "Pensive and Faltering."