The Walt Whitman Archive
In Whitman's Hand
Manuscripts
About this Item
Title: Returning to my pages' front once
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: Between 1871 and 1876
Whitman Archive ID: loc.00088
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 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: This manuscript is a draft of lines in "Out from Behind This Mask," a poem published first in the New York Tribune on February 19, 1876. This manuscript was probably written in the early to mid-1870s, after the creation of the photograph upon which "Out from Behind This Mask" is based and before publication of the poem in the Tribune.
Contributors to digital file: Jennifer Overcamp, Nick Krauter, Nicole Gray, Andrew Jewell, Kenneth Price, and Brett Barney
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(Returning to my pages' front once
more, resuming all,
Songs, sorrows, tragedies, with stalwart
joys—O heaven!
The passionate, teeming play this curtain
hid!)
A
glance look—a flashing token of
my‑
self—to future time.
I launch to To
yYou, whoe'er you
are, I launch, through space
revolving,
These burin'd eyes—this globe head & face.
These convolutions, miniature of all
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![[Page image: https://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/figures/loc.00496.002.jpg]](https://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/figures/loc.00496.002.jpg)