With All Thy Gifts

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) · Leaves of Grass · Autumn Rivulets · 1876

With all thy gifts America,
Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,
Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee⁠—with these and like of these vouchsafed to thee,
What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem never solving,)
The gift of perfect women fit for thee⁠—what if that gift of gifts thou lackest?
The towering feminine of thee? the beauty, health, completion, fit for thee?
The mothers fit for thee?

Where this text comes from

First published in Two Rivulets (Camden, 1876). Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1876 Two Rivulets 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–#L7.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “With All Thy Gifts.” First published in Two Rivulets (Camden, 1876). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/with-all-thy-gifts/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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