The Ship Starting

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Inscriptions · 1865

Lo, the unbounded sea,
On its breast a ship starting, spreading all sails, carrying even her moonsails,
The pennant is flying aloft as she speeds she speeds so stately⁠—below emulous waves press forward,
They surround the ship with shining curving motions and foam.

Where this text comes from

First published in Drum-Taps (New York, 1865). 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. [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, inscriptions.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 Ship Starting.” First published in Drum-Taps (New York, 1865). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/the-ship-starting/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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