Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Literary Manuscripts
  3. Loose Manuscripts
  4. yal.00001

With husky‑haughty lips, O Sea!

About This Item

  • Title: With husky‑haughty lips, O Sea!
  • Date: Late 1883 or early 1884
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: yal.00001
  • Source: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript 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 is a late draft of "With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!," which was published first in Harper's Monthly in March 1884. The manuscript was probably written in late 1883 or early 1884, shortly before the poem was published.
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "With husky‑haughty lips, O Sea!." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 18 April 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: yal.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] 529 headline Some black or antique if you have it

With husky‑haughty lips, O Sea!

With husky‑haughty lips, O sSea! Where day and night I wend thy surf‑beat shore, Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions, Thy troops of white‑maned racers racing to the goal, Thy ample smiling face, dash'd with the spark-  
 ling dimples of the sun, Thy brooding scowl and murk—thy unloos'd  
 hurricanes Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness; Great as thou art o'er all, ^art seem'st above the rest, thy many tears—a lack  
 from all eternity in thy content, (Naught but the greatest, struggles, sorrows, wrongs, ^and wrongs, repressions, ^wrongs, defeats,  
 could make thee greatest—no less could  
 make thee,) Thy lonely state—something thou ever seek'st and  
 seek'st, yet never gain'st, Some ^Surely some right withheld—some voice, ^in huge monotonous rage, of freedom‑lover  
 pent,—some huge monotonous rage, Some vast heart, like a planet's, chain'd and chafing ^in those breakers, By lengthen'd swell, and spasm, and panting breath, And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves, And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter, And undertones of distant lion roar, (Sounding, appealing to the sky's deaf ear—but now  
 rapport for once, A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,) The first and last confession of the globe, Outsurging, muttering from thy soul's abysms, The tale of cosmic elemental passion Thou tellest to a Kindred soul. Walt Whitman   [begin leaf 1 verso] wkys
Back to top