"Every day at sundown"

A short, but precise, poem about meetings and partings

Jan 30, 2026

Walt Whitman, “Out of the rolling ocean the crowd”

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,
Whispering, I love you, before long I die,
I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,
For I could not die till I once look’d on you,
For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.

Now we have met, we have look’d, we are safe,
Return in peace to the ocean my love,
I too am part of that ocean, my love, we are not so much separated,
Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!
But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,
As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever;
Be not impatient – a little space – know you I salute the air, the ocean and the land,
Every day at sundown for your dear sake, my love.

Winslow Homer, *Moonlight, Wood Island Light* (1894; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winslow_Homer)

What we love about this passage...

A single drop of water is personified and given speech. It tells us it has traveled a great distance for one purpose only: to look upon a beloved face before it disappears. It is like a message in a bottle, ephemeral and evanescent. The poet receives this gesture with gratitude, if somewhat formally, returning it through a quiet, nightly salute to the tiny drop. The speech gives the the impersonal sea a romantic and familiar intimacy.

Whitman’s use of the elevated “rondure”, which means a graceful curve or roundness, is perhaps surprising, but it helps the image he is drawing ultimately come off: two people may be physically separated but somehow still connected, through this arc, like distinct parts of the same sea.

The poem’s emphasis on movement, distance, and return also echoes natural patterns familiar from the ocean world—sea birds and turtles that travel far only to find their way back again.

About the author

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) is considered among the United States of America’s greatest poets. His publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 brought him immediate attention—along with controversy—and even a positive review anonymously penned by the entrepreneurial and audacious Whitman himself. His literary forerunner, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, famously wrote to him: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Whitman was also popular in Britain, where some of his earliest and most enthusiastic supporters included Oscar Wilde.

To read alongside...

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) is an innovative novel whose structure evokes the rolling waves of the sea as the individual characters’ interior narratives blend into one another to create a single voice. She challenges conventions of plot, character, and narrative voice in fiction through this single unifying metaphor of waves.

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