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Sailing Down the Mississippi at Midnight

About This Item

  • Title: Sailing Down the Mississippi at Midnight
  • Date: February 1848
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: nyp.00736
  • 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 is a partial draft of the poem published as "The Mississippi at Midnight" on March 6, 1848, in the New Orleans Daily Crescent. A revised version of the poem, titled "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight," was later included in Specimen Days & Collect (1882–3). Whitman left for New Orleans in February, 1848, so this manuscript was almost certainly written in that month.
  • Related Item(s):
    • Draft lines on the back of this manuscript leaf also probably relate to the poem eventually titled "Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight." See nyp.00106.
    • See wwa.00599.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Sailing Down the Mississippi at Midnight." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 08 May 2025. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: nyp.00736.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]

Sailing down the Mississippi, of a Clo[cut away] at  
  Midnight.—

Vast black folds of a pall from skyward Vast and black starless, the pall of heaven Laps on the trailing pall below And plunging athwart the solemn ^onward, onward, amid ^in solemn darkness As if to the Sea of the Lost we go.— Now drawn nigher the ^river's rim edge of the river of the river Wierd like creatures suddenly rise [cut away]m   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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