Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun

Walt Whitman

Teacher card

Published: 1855, in Leaves of Grass
Length: 16 lines, 138 words, 1 word in 12 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 5–6. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: summer, sun
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

1Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,Give me autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows,Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape,Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teachingcontent,Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of theMississippi, and I looking up at the stars,Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I canwalk undisturb’d,Give me for marriage a sweet-breath’d woman of whom I should never tire,Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of theworld a rural domestic life,Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears only,

Walt Whitman (died 1892), Leaves of Grass (1855), lines 10229–10245 of Project Gutenberg ebook #1322. Public domain in Australia: the author died before 1955. Copied word for word and checked against the ebook.

What to do with it

One link and one task line for each activity. Send a student the one you want them to do, or print this page and hand it round; each link has a QR code.

Its lines are dealt for the sky in the weather poemsin weatherline · 16 lines · about 5–10 min
Task for students (you can change the sentence before you print; nothing is saved)See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
See where weatherline takes lines from this poem, then read today's poem the sky has chosen.
weatherline.popplepoetry.com/sources#wh-sun

Send the whole hand-out

This page’s link. Students open it, read the text and pick what to do; nothing asks them to sign in.

Link for the whole text

https://popplepoetry.com/find/whitman-give-me-the-splendid-silent-sun · popplepoetry.com