For Him I Sing
For him I sing,I raise the present on the past,(As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past,)With time and space I him dilate and fuse the immortal laws,To make himself by them the law unto himself.
About this text
For Him I Sing is in the public domain. This text is taken from Leaves of Grass, Project Gutenberg ebook #1322; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Walt Whitman, For Him I Sing, in Leaves of Grass (1855–1892), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #1322, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/whitman-leaves/for-him-i-sing.html, id L03830.
Form and metre
For Him I Sing is 5 lines in a single stanza. The lines average 11.2 syllables.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 -AA-- sing · pastA · pastA · laws · himself
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| For him I sing, | 4 | ···· |
| I raise the present on the past, | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| (As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past,) | 17 | ··˘/˘˘······/˘··· |
| With time and space I him dilate and fuse the immortal laws, | 15 | ······˘/···˘/˘· |
| To make himself by them the law unto himself. | 12 | ··˘/······˘/ |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.