A Paumanok Picture

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood · 1856?

Two boats with nets lying off the sea-beach, quite still,
Ten fishermen waiting⁠—they discover a thick school of mossbonkers⁠—they drop the join’d seine-ends in the water,
The boats separate and row off, each on its rounding course to the beach, enclosing the mossbonkers,
The net is drawn in by a windlass by those who stop ashore,
Some of the fishermen lounge in their boats, others stand ankle-deep in the water, pois’d on strong legs,
The boats partly drawn up, the water slapping against them,
Strew’d on the sand in heaps and windrows, well out from the water, the green-back’d spotted mossbonkers.

Where this text comes from

First published in Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1856). This date is uncertain. Accepted at the majority threshold (three of six probes). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the Whitman Archive transcription of the 1856 Fowler & Wells edition (ppp.00237). The corpus text follows the 1891–92 arrangement, by which the poem had been revised. First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1]

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass, thou-mother-with-thy-equal-brood.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L7.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “A Paumanok Picture.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1856). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/a-paumanok-picture/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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