{
 "id": "walt-whitman/year-of-meteors",
 "title": "Year of Meteors",
 "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": 99,
 "container": "Birds of Passage",
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1865,
  "venue": "Drum-Taps (New York, 1865)",
  "note": "Located in this edition by matching this text's lines against the 1865 Drum-Taps 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.",
  "uncertain": false,
  "sources": [
   "https://archive.org/details/waltwhitmansdrum00whit"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass",
  "file": "birds-of-passage.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": 25,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 132,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Year of meteors! brooding year!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I would bind in words retrospective some of your deeds and signs,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "(I was at hand, silent I stood with teeth shut close, I watch’d,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I stood very near you old man when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal’d wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I would sing in my copious song your census returns of the States,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The tables of population and products, I would sing of your ships and their cargoes,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The proud black ships of Manhattan arriving, some fill’d with immigrants, some from the isthmus with cargoes of gold,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Songs thereof would I sing, to all that hitherward comes would I welcome give,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "And you would I sing, fair stripling! welcome to you from me, young prince of England!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "(Remember you surging Manhattan’s crowds as you pass’d with your cortege of nobles?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment;)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Nor forget I to sing of the wonder, the ship as she swam up my bay,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Well-shaped and stately the Great Eastern swam up my bay, she was 600 feet long,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Her moving swiftly surrounded by myriads of small craft I forget not to sing;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north flaring in heaven,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Nor the strange huge meteor-procession dazzling and clear shooting over our heads,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "(A moment, a moment long it sail’d its balls of unearthly light over our heads,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Of such, and fitful as they, I sing⁠—with gleams from them would I gleam and patch these chants,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good⁠—year of forebodings!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Year of comets and meteors transient and strange⁠—lo! even here one equally transient and strange!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this chant,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "What am I myself but one of your meteors?",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}