I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Children of Adam · 1867

I heard you solemn-sweet pipes of the organ as last Sunday morn I pass’d the church,
Winds of autumn, as I walk’d the woods at dusk I heard your long-stretch’d sighs up above so mournful,
I heard the perfect Italian tenor singing at the opera, I heard the soprano in the midst of the quartet singing;
Heart of my love! you too I heard murmuring low through one of the wrists around my head,
Heard the pulse of you when all was still ringing little bells last night under my ear.

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, children-of-adam.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). “I Heard You Solemn-Sweet Pipes of the Organ.” First published in Leaves of Grass (New York, 1867). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/i-heard-you-solemn-sweet-pipes-of-the-organ/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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