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To Those Who've Fail'd

About This Item

  • Title: To Those Who've Fail'd
  • Date: 27 January 1888
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.00092
  • Source: New York Herald 27 January 1888: 6. 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: Whitman, Walt. "To Those Who've Fail'd." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 09 November 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.00092.xml (TEI)
per.00092.006per.00092.006_cropped

To Those Who've Fail'd.1

To those who've fail'd in aspirations vast, To unnamed soldiers, fall'n in front, on the lead, To calm, devoted engineers, to over ardent 
  travellers, to pilots on their ships, To many a song and picture without parturi- 
 tion, I'd rear a laurel cover'd monument High, high above the rest—to all cut off before 
  their time, Possess'd by some great spirit of fire Quenched by an early death. WALT WHITMAN.

Notes

1. Reprinted in the "Sands at Seventy" annex to Leaves of Grass (1888). Whitman made a number of changes to the poem for its printing in "Sands at Seventy," including making "aspirations" singular in the first line; inserting the word "lofty" and changing "parturition" to "recognition" in the fourth line; and replacing "great" with "strange" in the final line. The punctuation also differs in places. [back]

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