Title: Certainties, Faith, Counterbalances, Alternation
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: About 1887 or 1888
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00075
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from The Walt Whitman Archive I: Whitman Manuscripts at the Library of Congress, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Garland, 1993), 1:175. The transcription was then checked against 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: This manuscript is a draft of "Continuities," a poem published first in the New York Herald on March 20, 1888. It was likely written around 1887 or 1888, shortly before the poem was published.
Related item: On the back of this manuscript is an undated letter to Whitman from Talcott Williams. The letter has been crossed out, probably by Whitman.
Contributors to digital file: Nick Krauter, Peter Henry, Nicole Gray, Andrew Jewell, Kenneth Price, and Brett Barney
Certainties, Faith
Counterbalances,
Alternation
The body ^sluggish, old,
The fires in em embers left of earlier fires
The frozen winter clods
—but —to them
the
spring
shall come
And [heads?] With grass
and leaves flowers and summer
branches green fruits and corn
The sun is ^now sinking low in the west de
Shall rise again to morning and to noon
The light in the eye grows dim—the
body blood all sluggish,
old
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