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11.19.08: Reading Guide

‘Time to Come’ will strike new readers because of its traditional poetic form. “We are just not prepared to hear rhyme and meter from Whitman, our first great free-verse poet.” David Baker looks at one of Walt Whitman’s earliest poems.

Time to Come
BY Walt Whitman
O, Death! a black and pierceless pall
    Hangs round thee, and the future state;
No eye may see, no mind may grasp
    That mystery of fate.

This braid, which now alternate throbs
    With swelling hope and gloomy fear;
This heart, with all the changing hues,
    That mortal passions bear—

This curious frame of human mould,
    Where unrequited cravings play,
This brain, and heart, and wondrous form
    Must all alike decay.

The leaping blood will stop its flow;
    The hoarse death-struggle pass; the cheek
Lay bloomless, and the liquid tongue
    Will then forget to speak.

The grave will tame me; earth will close
    O’er cold dull limbs and ashy face;
But where, O, Nature, where shall be
    The soul’s abiding place?

Will it e’en live? For though its light
    Must shine till from the body town;
Then, when the oil of life is spent,
    Still shall the taper burn?

O, powerless is this struggling brain
    To rend the mighty mystery;
In dark, uncertain awe it waits
    The common doom, to die.

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Rx for the Perplexed

How to Read a Poem (and Fall in Love with Poetry)

Curious about poetry, but don't know where or how to begin? We've reprinted the first chapter from the book How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch. Its 16 sections provide strategies for reading poems, and each section has plenty of links to examples of poems in our archive to illustrate the points.