On a flat road runs the well-train’d runner, He is lean and sinewy with muscular legs, He is thinly clothed, he leans forward as he runs, With lightly closed fists and arms partially rais’d.
Where this text comes from
First published in Leaves of Grass (New York, 1867). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the Whitman Archive transcription of the 1867 Chapin edition (ppp.00473). 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–#L4.
Cite this poem
Walt Whitman (1819–1892).
“The Runner.” First published in Leaves of Grass (New York, 1867).
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/the-runner/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
More by Walt Whitman