Look down fair moon and bathe this scene, Pour softly down night’s nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple, On the dead on their backs with arms toss’d wide, Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.
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–#L4.
Cite this poem
Walt Whitman (1819–1892).
“Look Down Fair Moon.” First published in Drum-Taps (New York, 1865).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/look-down-fair-moon/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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