As the Time Draws Nigh

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Songs of Parting · 1860

As the time draws nigh glooming a cloud,
A dread beyond of I know not what darkens me.

I shall go forth,
I shall traverse the States awhile, but I cannot tell whither or how long,
Perhaps soon some day or night while I am singing my voice will suddenly cease.

O book, O chants! must all then amount to but this?
Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us?⁠—and yet it is enough, O soul;
O soul, we have positively appear’d⁠—that is enough.

Where this text comes from

First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1860–61). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1860–61 scan. 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, songs-of-parting.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L8.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “As the Time Draws Nigh.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1860–61). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/as-the-time-draws-nigh/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

More by Walt Whitman