Gliding O'er all
Gliding o’er all, through all,Through Nature, Time, and Space,As a ship on the waters advancing,The voyage of the soul--not life alone,Death, many deaths I’ll sing.
About this text
Gliding O'er all 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, Gliding O'er all, in Leaves of Grass (1855–1892), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #1322, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/whitman-leaves/gliding-o-er-all.html, id L25584.
Form and metre
Gliding O'er all is 5 lines in a single stanza.
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 --A-A all · space · advancingA · alone · singA
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Gliding o’er all, through all, | 6 | /˘···· |
| Through Nature, Time, and Space, | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| As a ship on the waters advancing, | 10 | ·····/˘˘/˘ |
| The voyage of the soul--not life alone, | 10 | ·/˘·····˘/ |
| Death, many deaths I’ll sing. | 6 | ·/˘··· |
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.