{
 "id": "walt-whitman/on-the-beach-at-night-alone",
 "title": "On the Beach at Night Alone",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "Walt Whitman",
 "poet_slug": "walt-whitman",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Leaves of Grass",
 "book_slug": "leaves-of-grass",
 "book_kind": "volume",
 "sequence": 109,
 "container": "Sea-Drift",
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1856,
  "venue": "Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1856)",
  "note": "Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the Whitman Archive transcription of the 1856 Fowler & Wells edition (ppp.00237). 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.",
  "uncertain": false,
  "sources": [
   "https://whitmanarchive.org/item/ppp.00237"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass",
  "file": "sea-drift.xhtml",
  "upstream": [
   "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1322",
   "https://archive.org/details/leavesgrass03whitgoog"
  ],
  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-12",
  "corrections": [
   {
    "line": 1,
    "field": "indent",
    "was": 0,
    "now": 4,
    "why": "Indentation absent from the source markup and measured from the scan: this line starts 10.6 character advances (~5.3 em) right of its own page's base margin, where the verse sets flush. Converted at 3.0 advances per indent level (tools/defects.py indent).",
    "checked_against": "https://archive.org/details/leavesgrass03whitgoog",
    "date": "2026-08-20"
   }
  ]
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 14,
  "n_stanzas": 2,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 102,
  "max_indent": 4
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "On the beach at night alone,",
    "indent": 4
   },
   {
    "text": "As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ],
  [
   {
    "text": "A vast similitude interlocks all,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "All distances of place however wide,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "All distances of time, all inanimate forms,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}