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Whitman Archive Title: Sweet flag
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Whitman Archive ID: duk.00883
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Repository ID: MS q 2
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Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts in the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
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Repository Title: Song of Myself (Autograph MS, draft portions) To be at all...
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Date: Between 1850 and 1855
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Genre: prose, poetry
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Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten
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Content:
Whitman probably drafted this manuscript in the early 1850s as he was composing the first (1855) edition of
Leaves of Grass.
This manuscript, filled with suggestive words and phrases, appears to have contributed to the first and fourth poems in the volume, eventually titled "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers," respectively. The phrase the phrase "polished melons" is reminiscent of the line "I reach to the leafy lips . . . . I reach to the polished breasts of melons" in "Song of Myself," and the list in this manuscript may relate to the following line: "Root of washed sweet-flag, timorous pond-snipe, nest of guarded duplicate eggs, it shall be you." Other elements of this manuscript appear to have contributed to "The Sleepers." The jotting "I am a look / mystic / in a trance/ exaltation" may have led to the line "I am a dance . . . . Play up there! the fit is whirling me fast." Further, the reference to the soothing hand is perhaps an early version of the passage in which the narrator, who stands "with drooping eyes by the worstsuffering and restless," passes his "hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them." Finally, the passage about "Sap that flows from the end of the manly maple" (associated in the manuscript with the "tooth of delight" and "tooth prong") probably contributed to the following passage in the same poem: "The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth advances in darkness, / And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms by touching glasses, and the best liquor afterward." These lines were removed from the final versioen of the poem. The writing on the reverse side of the leaf (duk.00001) contributed to a different part of the poem that became "Song of Myself."
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