What Am I After All

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Autumn Rivulets · 1860

What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my own name? repeating it over and over;
I stand apart to hear⁠—it never tires me.

To you your name also;
Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in the sound of your name?

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, autumn-rivulets.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L4.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “What Am I After All.” First published in Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1860–61). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/what-am-i-after-all/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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