Lyric Poem · Love
Unnamed Lands
by Walt Whitman
1NATIONS ten thousand years before These States, and many times ten thousand years before
2 These
3 States;
4Garner’d clusters of ages, that men and women like us grew up and travel’d their
5 course, and pass’d on;
6What vast-built cities—what orderly republics—what pastoral tribes and nomads;
7What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others;
8What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions;
9What sort of marriage—what costumes—what physiology and phrenology;
10What of liberty and slavery among them—what they thought of death and the soul;
11Who were witty and wise—who beautiful and poetic—who brutish and
12 undevelop’d;
13Not a mark, not a record remains—And yet all remains.
14O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any more than we are for nothing;
15I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as much as we now belong to
16 it,
17 and as all will henceforth belong to it.
18Afar they stand—yet near to me they stand,
19Some with oval countenances, learn’d and calm,
20Some naked and savage—Some like huge collections of insects,
21Some in tents—herdsmen, patriarchs, tribes, horsemen,
22Some prowling through woods—Some living peaceably on farms, laboring, reaping,
23 filling
24 barns,
25Some traversing paved avenues, amid temples, palaces, factories, libraries, shows, courts,
26 theatres, wonderful monuments.
27Are those billions of men really gone?
28Are those women of the old experience of the earth gone?
29Do their lives, cities, arts, rest only with us?
30Did they achieve nothing for good, for themselves?
31I believe of all those billions of men and women that fill’d the unnamed lands, every
32 one
33 exists this hour, here or elsewhere, invisible to us, in exact proportion to what he or
34 she
35 grew from in life, and out of what he or she did, felt, became, loved, sinn’d, in
36 life.
37I believe that was not the end of those nations, or any person of them, any more than this
38 shall be the end of my nation, or of me;
39Of their languages, governments, marriage, literature, products, games, wars, manners,
40 crimes,
41 prisons, slaves, heroes, poets, I suspect their results curiously await in the yet unseen
42 world—counterparts of what accrued to them in the seen world.
43I suspect I shall meet them there,
44I suspect I shall there find each old particular of those unnamed lands.
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“Unnamed Lands” by Walt Whitman — quilloak.com/poems/unnamed-lands
Quick facts
- Poem
- Unnamed Lands
- Poet
- Walt Whitman
- Length
- 44 lines
- Form
- Lyric Poem
- Themes
- Love, Death & Loss, Nature
Craft notes
How this poem works
Measured from the text on this page, not copied from a summary. Counts are approximate: syllables and rhymes come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which models General American English, so dialect, older pronunciation, and performance can all change what you hear.
- Shape
- 44 lines · 6 stanzas of 4–13 lines
- End rhyme
- No regular perfect end rhyme. The poem may still be using slant rhyme, assonance, or internal echo, which this check does not score.
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Text, source & rights
A traceable edition
Full-text display is based on the committed source record and a United States term-expiry review.
- Author record
- Walt Whitman1819–1892
- Source record
- PoetryDBUnnamed Lands by walt-whitman, PoetryDB transcription
- Display decision
- Full text · United States · reviewed 2026-07-18
- Publication record
- Not recorded in the imported source
- Text fingerprint
- SHA-256 8eda9e8912a9a93c…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.