The Sobbing of the Bells

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Songs of Parting · 1881

The sobbing of the bells, the sudden death-news everywhere,
The slumberers rouse, the rapport of the People,
(Full well they know that message in the darkness,
Full well return, respond within their breasts, their brains, the sad reverberations,)
The passionate toll and clang⁠—city to city, joining, sounding, passing,
Those heart-beats of a Nation in the night.

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, songs-of-parting.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L6.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “The Sobbing of the Bells.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1881–82). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/the-sobbing-of-the-bells/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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