The Dalliance of the Eagles

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · By the Roadside · 1881

Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o’er the river pois’d, the twain yet one, a moment’s lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.

Where this text comes from

First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1881–82). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1881–82 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, by-the-roadside.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). “The Dalliance of the Eagles.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1881–82). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/the-dalliance-of-the-eagles/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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