The Last Invocation

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

At the last, tenderly,
From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,
From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the well-closed doors,
Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness unlock the locks⁠—with a whisper,
Set ope the doors O soul.

Tenderly⁠—be not impatient,
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,
Strong is your hold O love.)

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–#L10.

Cite this poem

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

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