‘as the sun falling round a helpless thing’
Photographic Copy Print of Walt Whitman.
[London: Edy Brothers, Summer 1880].
Price: $650.00
About the item
Silver print (paper stamped Tapioca on verso). Image 5-1/2 x 3-1/2 inches; Paper 8 x 5-1/2 inches. Toned, image faded. Very good.
Item #339095
This image of Whitman is closely cropped from one of the portraits of Whitman taken during his visit to Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke in London, Ontario, and bears a transcription in an unknown hand from the preface to Leaves of Grass (1855), in the variant form as recast by him in “Poem of Many in One” from the 1856 Leaves:
He judges not as the Judge Judges, but as the sun falling round a helpless thing,
As he sees the farthest he has the most faith,
His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things,
In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent,
He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue & denouement,
He sees eternity in men & women, he does not see men & women as dreams & dots
The poem, with further revisions, was retitled “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” in 1881.
