Pensive and Faltering

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Whispers of Heavenly Death · 1871

Pensive and faltering,
The words the Dead I write,
For living are the Dead,
(Haply the only living, only real,
And I the apparition, I the spectre.)

Where this text comes from

First published in Leaves of Grass (Washington, 1871). 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. [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, whispers-of-heavenly-death.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L5.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “Pensive and Faltering.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Washington, 1871). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/pensive-and-faltering/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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