{
 "id": "walt-whitman/pensive-and-faltering",
 "title": "Pensive and Faltering",
 "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": 252,
 "container": "Whispers of Heavenly Death",
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1871,
  "venue": "Leaves of Grass (Washington, 1871)",
  "note": "Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1871 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.",
  "uncertain": false,
  "sources": [
   "https://archive.org/details/leavesofgrawhit"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass",
  "file": "whispers-of-heavenly-death.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": 5,
    "why": "Indentation absent from the source markup and measured from the scan: this line starts 15.9 character advances (~8.0 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": 5,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 37,
  "max_indent": 5
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Pensive and faltering,",
    "indent": 5
   },
   {
    "text": "The words the Dead I write,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "For living are the Dead,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "(Haply the only living, only real,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And I the apparition, I the spectre.)",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}