Aboard at a Ship’s Helm

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Sea-Drift · 1867

Aboard at a ship’s helm,
A young steersman steering with care.

Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing,
An ocean-bell⁠—O a warning bell, rock’d by the waves.

O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,
Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place.

For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,
The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her gray sails,
The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds away gayly and safe.

But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!
Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.

Where this text comes from

First published in Leaves of Grass (New York, 1867). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the Whitman Archive transcription of the 1867 Chapin edition (ppp.00473). 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, sea-drift.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L11.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “Aboard at a Ship’s Helm.” First published in Leaves of Grass (New York, 1867). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/aboard-at-a-ships-helm/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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