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A procession without halt

About This Item

  • Title: A procession without halt
  • Date: Between 1861 and 1870
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: owu.00001
  • Source: The Bayley-Whitman Collection, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH. 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: The date is unknown. Whitman used the image of a procession many times in his poetry, including in section 38 of "Song of Myself" and in section 6 of "Return of the Heroes" (in the final versions of those poems). However, this manuscript is most likely a draft toward a different poem altogether. It is possible these lines were composed between 1861 and 1870, when Whitman had most reason to employ imagery of marching.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "A procession without halt." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 20 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: owu.00001.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] A procession without rest or halt, Apparent at times and hid at times, Rising the rising grounds, in relief  
 against the clear sky, lost  
 in the g hollows, stretched  
 interminably over the plains, No eye so far‑reaching as to  
 see where the last first No eye that ever saw the starting—  
 no eye that ever shall need  
 wait for the ending T Where [illegible] any one passes views goes, however ahead,  
 the rest only coming, however  
 far behind, Marches the a marching procession   [begin leaf 1 verso]
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