About this Item

Title: Hear my fife

Creator: Walt Whitman

Date: Between 1850 and 1860

Whitman Archive ID: uva.00565

Source: Papers of Walt Whitman (MSS 3829), Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert H. Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. Transcribed from digital images of the original. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.

Editorial note: Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the 1850s. The lines are versions of a line in a long manuscript poem titled "Pictures," which probably dates to the mid- to late 1850s. Based on the first-person perspective in these draft lines, Emory Holloway has speculated that they likely were written after the line in "Pictures" (Pictures: An Unpublished Poem of Walt Whitman [New York: The June House, 1927], 31). The first several lines of "Pictures" (not including this line) were eventually revised and published as "My Picture-Gallery" in The American in October 1880. The poem was later published in Leaves of Grass as part of the "Autumn Rivulets" cluster.

Related item: Lines on the back of this leaf appeared, in revised form, in the poem eventually titled "The Sleepers." See uva.00260.