To Get the Final Lilt of Songs

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Sands at Seventy · 1888

To get the final lilt of songs,
To penetrate the inmost lore of poets⁠—to know the mighty ones,
Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Emerson;
To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and doubt⁠—to truly understand,
To encompass these, the last keen faculty and entrance-price,
Old age, and what it brings from all its past experiences.

Where this text comes from

First published in November Boughs (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1888). Printed in “Sands at Seventy,” the verse section of November Boughs, and gathered into Leaves of Grass as the First Annex in 1891–92, which is the arrangement the corpus text follows. First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1] [2]

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, sands-at-seventy.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). “To Get the Final Lilt of Songs.” First published in November Boughs (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1888). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/to-get-the-final-lilt-of-songs/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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