Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Literary Manuscripts
  3. Loose Manuscripts
  4. duk.00883

Sweet flag

About This Item

  • Title: Sweet flag
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1855
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: duk.00883
  • 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: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The manuscript, filled with suggestive words and phrases, may have contributed to the first and fourth poems in the volume, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers," respectively.
  • Related Item(s):
    • On the back of this manuscript is a poetry draft that includes several lines that would appear in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. See duk.00001.
    • See wwa.00035.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Sweet flag." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: duk.00883.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]
  • Sweet flag
  • Sweet fern
  • illuminated face
  • clarified
  • unpolluted
  • flour-corn
  • aromatic
  • Calamus
  • sweet-gum
  • bulb 
      and melons with 
      bulbs swee grateful 
      to the hand
I am a look 
  mystic 
  in a trance 
  exaltation something wild and 
  untamed—noble 
 —half savage 
  common things The sSweet Trickling Trickling sSap ^that trickles drops flows 
  from the end of the 
  poli little 
  manly maple 
  tooth of delight 
  tooth-prong 
 —tine spendt spend bulbous bulbous Living bulbs, melons with polished 
  rinds the hand soothinghe that 
  the hand to touch 
  smooth to the press reached 
  hand Bulbs of life-lilies, polished melons, 
  reach flavored for the gentlest mildest hand that 
  shall reach,   [begin leaf 1 verso]
Back to top