To the Garden the World

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Children of Adam · 1860

To the garden the world anew ascending,
Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,
The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me again,
Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous,
My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for reasons, most wondrous,
Existing I peer and penetrate still,
Content with the present, content with the past,
By my side or back of me Eve following,
Or in front, and I following her just the same.

Where this text comes from

First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1860–61). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1860–61 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, children-of-adam.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L11.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “To the Garden the World.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1860–61). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/to-the-garden-the-world/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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