My Picture-Gallery

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Autumn Rivulets · 1881

In a little house keep I pictures suspended, it is not a fix’d house,
It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other;
Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all memories!
Here the tableaus of life, and here the groupings of death;
Here, do you know this? this is cicerone himself,
With finger rais’d he points to the prodigal pictures.

Where this text comes from

First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1881–82). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1881–82 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, autumn-rivulets.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L6.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “My Picture-Gallery.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1881–82). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/my-picture-gallery/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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