Thick-Sprinkled Bunting

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · From Noon to Starry Night · 1865

Thick-sprinkled bunting! flag of stars!
Long yet your road, fateful flag⁠—long yet your road, and lined with bloody death,
For the prize I see at issue at last is the world,
All its ships and shores I see interwoven with your threads greedy banner;
Dream’d again the flags of kings, highest borne, to flaunt unrival’d?
O hasten flag of man⁠—O with sure and steady step, passing highest flags of kings,
Walk supreme to the heavens mighty symbol⁠—run up above them all,
Flag of stars! thick-sprinkled bunting!

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, from-noon-to-starry-night.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L8.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “Thick-Sprinkled Bunting.” First published in Drum-Taps (New York, 1865). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/thick-sprinkled-bunting/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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