City of Ships

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Drum-Taps · 1865

City of ships!
(O the black ships! O the fierce ships!
O the beautiful sharp-bow’d steam-ships and sail-ships!)
City of the world! (for all races are here,
All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!
City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and out with eddies and foam!
City of wharves and stores⁠—city of tall façades of marble and iron!
Proud and passionate city⁠—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
Spring up O city⁠—not for peace alone, but be indeed yourself, warlike!
Fear not⁠—submit to no models but your own O city!
Behold me⁠—incarnate me as I have incarnated you!
I have rejected nothing you offer’d me⁠—whom you adopted I have adopted,
Good or bad I never question you⁠—I love all⁠—I do not condemn anything,
I chant and celebrate all that is yours⁠—yet peace no more,
In peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is mine,
War, red war is my song through your streets, O city!

Where this text comes from

First published in Drum-Taps (New York, 1865). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1865 Drum-Taps 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, drum-taps.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L17.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “City of Ships.” First published in Drum-Taps (New York, 1865). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/city-of-ships/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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