Lo, Victress on the Peaks

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Drum-Taps · 1867

Lo, Victress on the peaks,
Where thou with mighty brow regarding the world,
(The world O Libertad, that vainly conspired against thee,)
Out of its countless beleaguering toils, after thwarting them all,
Dominant, with the dazzling sun around thee,
Flauntest now unharm’d in immortal soundness and bloom⁠—lo, in these hours supreme,
No poem proud, I chanting bring to thee, nor mastery’s rapturous verse,
But a cluster containing night’s darkness and blood-dripping wounds,
And psalms of the dead.

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, 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–#L9.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “Lo, Victress on the Peaks.” First published in Leaves of Grass (New York, 1867). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/lo-victress-on-the-peaks/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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