{
 "id": "walt-whitman/pensive-on-her-dead-gazing",
 "title": "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing",
 "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": 284,
 "container": "Songs of Parting",
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1865,
  "venue": "Drum-Taps (New York, 1865)",
  "note": "Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1865 Drum-Taps 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/waltwhitmansdrum00whit"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass",
  "file": "songs-of-parting.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"
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 17,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 98,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Pensive on her dead gazing I heard the Mother of All,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Desperate on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battle-fields gazing,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "(As the last gun ceased, but the scent of the powder-smoke linger’d,)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "As she call’d to her earth with mournful voice while she stalk’d,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Absorb them well O my earth, she cried, I charge you lose not my sons, lose not an atom,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And you streams absorb them well, taking their dear blood,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly impalpable,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And all you essences of soil and growth, and you my rivers’ depths,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And you mountain sides, and the woods where my dear children’s blood trickling redden’d,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And you trees down in your roots to bequeath to all future trees,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "My dead absorb or South or North⁠—my young men’s bodies absorb, and their precious precious blood,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Which holding in trust for me faithfully back again give me many a year hence,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "In blowing airs from the fields back again give me my darlings, give my immortal heroes,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Exhale me them centuries hence, breathe me their breath, let not an atom be lost,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}