The Walt Whitman Archive
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About this Item
Title: Continuities
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: March 20, 1888
Whitman Archive ID: per.00118
Source: New York Herald 20 March 1888: 6. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm copy of an original issue. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the periodical poems, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Elizabeth Lorang, April Lambert, and Susan Belasco
 image 1 |
[For the NEW YORK HERALD.]
Continuities.1
[From a talk I had lately with a German spiritualist.]
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world,
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere
confuse thy brain.
confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the field and
nature.
nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left
from earlier fires,
from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim shall duly flame
again;
again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings
and for noons continual;
and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible land
returns,
returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and
corn.
corn.
WALT WHITMAN.