{
 "id": "walt-whitman/twenty-years",
 "title": "Twenty Years",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "Walt Whitman",
 "poet_slug": "walt-whitman",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Leaves of Grass",
 "book_slug": "leaves-of-grass",
 "book_kind": "volume",
 "sequence": 340,
 "container": "Sands at Seventy",
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1888,
  "venue": "November Boughs (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1888)",
  "note": "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.",
  "uncertain": false,
  "sources": [
   "https://archive.org/details/novemberboughs00whitrich",
   "https://archive.org/details/novemberboughs00whitgoog"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass",
  "file": "sands-at-seventy.xhtml",
  "upstream": [
   "https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1322",
   "https://archive.org/details/leavesgrass03whitgoog"
  ],
  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-12"
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 12,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 107,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Down on the ancient wharf, the sand, I sit, with a new-comer chatting:",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "He shipp’d as green-hand boy, and sail’d away, (took some sudden, vehement notion;)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Since, twenty years and more have circled round and round,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "While he the globe was circling round and round,⁠—and now returns:",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "How changed the place⁠—all the old land-marks gone⁠—the parents dead;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "(Yes, he comes back to lay in port for good⁠—to settle⁠—has a well-fill’d purse⁠—no spot will do but this;)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The little boat that scull’d him from the sloop, now held in leash I see,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I hear the slapping waves, the restless keel, the rocking in the sand,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I see the sailor kit, the canvas bag, the great box bound with brass,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I scan the face all berry-brown and bearded⁠—the stout-strong frame,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Dress’d in its russet suit of good Scotch cloth:",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "(Then what the told-out story of those twenty years? What of the future?)",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}