{
 "id": "walt-whitman/years-of-the-modern",
 "title": "Years of the Modern",
 "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": 278,
 "container": "Songs of Parting",
 "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": "songs-of-parting.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": 30,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 109,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Years of the modern! years of the unperform’d!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Your horizon rises, I see it parting away for more august dramas,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I see not America only, not only Liberty’s nation but other nations preparing,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I see tremendous entrances and exits, new combinations, the solidarity of races,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I see that force advancing with irresistible power on the world’s stage,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "(Have the old forces, the old wars, played their parts? are the acts suitable to them closed?)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I see Freedom, completely arm’d and victorious and very haughty, with Law on one side and Peace on the other,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "A stupendous trio all issuing forth against the idea of caste;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "What historic denouements are these we so rapidly approach?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I see the frontiers and boundaries of the old aristocracies broken,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I see the landmarks of European kings removed,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "I see this day the People beginning their landmarks, (all others give way;)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Never were such sharp questions ask’d as this day,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Lo, how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere, he colonizes the Pacific, the archipelagoes,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "With the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "With these and the world-spreading factories he interlinks all geography, all lands;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Is humanity forming en-masse? for lo, tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "No one knows what will happen next, such portents fill the days and nights;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Years prophetical! the space ahead as I walk, as I vainly try to pierce it, is full of phantoms,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Unborn deeds, things soon to be, project their shapes around me,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "This incredible rush and heat, this strange ecstatic fever of dreams O years!",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Your dreams O years, how they penetrate through me! (I know not whether I sleep or wake;)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The perform’d America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The unperform’d, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}