[Hours continuing long] | Whitman Archive

Whitman Archive Title: [Hours continuing long]
Whitman Archive ID: uva.00314
Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts at the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia
Folder: 50-51
Date: 1857-1859
Genre: poetry
Physical Description: 2 leaves, leaf 1 9.5 x 9 cm; leaf 2 14.5 x 9 cm pasted to 5 x 9.5 cm, handwritten
View Images: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Content: On two pieces of white wove paper, the first cut down to 9.5 x 9 cm and the second comprising two sections (14.5 x 9 and 5 x 9.5 cm) joined by means of a strip of pink paper. In brown-black ink, with revisions in the same ink and in pencil. Pinholes mostly at top and in center of leaves. Whitman penciled in the numbers 11 and 12 (apparently over other numbers) in the lower-left corner of each page; his partly erased pencil note "(finished in/ the other city)" appears on the first page. The ornamental number "VIII" replaces a deleted ornamental "IX" on the first page, and the top of another "IX" appears at the foot of the second page, beneath a wavy line indicating the end of the poem. Whitman removed the lower section of page 2 from the top of current leaf 1:3:33 ("I dreamed in a dream of a/ city..."). This poem, the eighth in the sequence "Live Oak, with Moss," became section 9 of "Calamus" in 1860. This was its only appearance in Leaves . The first page contains what would become verses 1-3 in 1860, and the second ("Hours discouraged, distracted,") contains lines 4-12.