Osceola

When his hour for death had come,
He slowly rais’d himself from the bed on the floor,
Drew on his war-dress, shirt, leggings, and girdled the belt around his waist,
Call’d for vermilion paint (his looking-glass was held before him,)
Painted half his face and neck, his wrists, and back-hands,
Put the scalp-knife carefully in his belt⁠—then lying down, resting a moment,
Rose again, half sitting, smiled, gave in silence his extended hand to each and all,
Sank faintly low to the floor (tightly grasping the tomahawk handle,)
Fix’d his look on wife and little children⁠—the last:
(And here a line in memory of his name and death.)

Where this text comes from

First published in Good-Bye My Fancy (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891). Printed in Good-Bye My Fancy, whose title page calls it the 2d Annex to Leaves of Grass, and gathered in as the Second Annex in 1891–92, which is the arrangement the corpus text follows. 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, goodbye-my-fancy.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L10.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “Osceola.” First published in Good-Bye My Fancy (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/osceola/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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