For him I sing, I raise the present on the past, (As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past,) With time and space I him dilate and fuse the immortal laws, To make himself by them the law unto himself.
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, inscriptions.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (2)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L5.
Cite this poem
Walt Whitman (1819–1892).
“For Him I Sing.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Washington, 1871).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/for-him-i-sing/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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