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(Poem) Shadows

About This Item

  • Title: (Poem) Shadows
  • Date: Between 1850 and 1865
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00119
  • Source: The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. 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: This manuscript may have been written between 1850 and 1855, when Whitman was preparing materials for the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The description of the plate-glass windows on Broadway bears some resemblance to a description in the first poem in that edition, eventually titled "Song of Myself." It is also possible that the manuscript was written later, however: the description of Broadway in these lines also closely resembles a description Whitman wrote in his unfinished poem known as "The Two Vaults," a poem that is recorded in a New York notebook that probably dates to the early 1860s. Whitman also wrote about Broadway elsewhere in later poems, so the manuscript may have been written still later. The manuscript has been pasted down, so an image of the back of the leaf is currently unavailable.
  • Related Item(s):
    • A note about an editorial on "American Expansion and Settlement Inland" is written on the back of this leaf. See nyp.00737.
    • See wwa.00600.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "(Poem) Shadows." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: nyp.00119.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]

(Poem) Shadows ? Reflections

As seen in the windows 
  of the shops, passing up as I turn from  
  and over the crowded 
  street, and peer ^through the plate glass at the pictures 
  or rich goods In Broadway, the reflections, ^moving, glistening, silent 
  like phantasmic,——glistening Aside from Turn from behind the (the heavy base, the great hum and harshness, 
  [illegible] composite and musical, )—leaving it [illegible] The faces and figures, old and young 
  [illegible] all so various, all so phantasmic The omnibus passing, and then another 
  and another—the clou clear sky 
  up of
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