Death’s Valley (To Accompany a Picture by Request)

N.p: (Privately Printed), (1889). First Edition and Only Printing. Original broadside of a Walt Whitman poem privately printed for Whitman’s own use, and which exists in only in this one copy, and as such this unique copy was examined by the Whitman bibliographers and has its own assigned number in the Bibliography of American Literature, BAL 21534A. This unique piece is listed as in Joel Myerson’s Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography with its own number. A single leaf measuring 13 1/2 by 9 3/4 inches printed on the recto only. The broadside is hand-corrected by Whitman with additional words, and extensive repunctuation. On the verso, Whitman has handwritten the title along the left margin. A little chipping to the left and bottom margins, some expert and minor reinforcement to three horizontal creases on the blank verso from once having been folded, very good condition. Enclosed in a very handsome morocco and cloth clamshell box. Walt Whitman offered the poem for publication to Harper’s on August 30, 1889 (see Whitman’s correspondence, numbers 2100-2102, and, Daybooks and Notebooks, 1978, pp. 525, 530, and 532). The poem was eventually published by Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in April 1892, and collected in Leaves of Grass in 1897. The poem is a moving reflection on death as Whitman ages and looks back on his past and present encounters with death, including his service as a nurse during the Civil War. “Nay, do not dream, designer dark, / thou hast portrayed or hit thy theme entire: / I, hoverer of late by this dark valley, by its confines, having glimpses of it, / Here enter lists with thee, claiming my right to make a symbol too. / For I have seen many wounded soldiers die / After dread suffering-have seen their lives pass off with smiles: / And I have watch’d the death hours of the old - and seen the infant die, / The rich, with all his nurses and his doctors / And then the poor in meagreness and poverty; / And I myself for long, O Death, have breathed my every breath. / Amid the nearness and the silent thought of thee. / And out of these and thee, / I make a scene, a song, brief (not fear of thee, / Nor gloom’s ravines, nor bleak, nor dark - for I do not fear thee, Nor celebrate the struggles, or contortion, or hard-tied knot), / of the broad blessed light and perfect air, with meadows, rippling tides, and / trees and flowers and grass, / And the low hum of living breeze, and in the midst God’s beautiful eternal / right hand, / Thee, holiest minister of heaven - thee, envoy, usherer guide at last of all, / Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot call’d life, Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death.”