Delicate Cluster

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Drum-Taps · 1871

Delicate cluster! flag of teeming life!
Covering all my lands⁠—all my seashores lining!
Flag of death! (how I watch’d you through the smoke of battle pressing!
How I heard you flap and rustle, cloth defiant!)
Flag cerulean⁠—sunny flag, with the orbs of night dappled!
Ah my silvery beauty⁠—ah my woolly white and crimson!
Ah to sing the song of you, my matron mighty!
My sacred one, my mother!

Where this text comes from

First published in Leaves of Grass (Washington, 1871). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1871 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–#L8.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “Delicate Cluster.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Washington, 1871). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/delicate-cluster/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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