There was a child went forth every day

This poem stood, without a title, in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. Whitman paid for that edition himself and set some of the type in a Brooklyn printing shop. It held only twelve poems, against several hundred in the last edition he oversaw. The full text is on Project Gutenberg.

Where this text comes fromThe claim in the second line is the whole poem: whatever the child looked at, he became. Everything after it is a list assembled to prove the point, and the list is the form Whitman invented for himself and used for the rest of his life. This piece stood in the first edition without a title, in a book of twelve poems that its author paid to print and partly set in type himself. At 225 characters this is one of the shortest fragments in the English corpus here.

What you might not noticeThe poem carries no title in the edition where it first appeared. What everyone now uses as its name is simply its opening line, pressed into service by later editors. Source

What it trainsForty-five words in a single sentence with four commas and one apostrophe, inside look’d, where the elision removes a vowel. That apostrophe is the only punctuation besides four commas and the closing full stop, and the quote key in your home row types it exactly as it appears. Four capitals, three of them inside the sentence at line openings. Nothing else is difficult, and at 225 characters the passage is over quickly, which makes it useful for a clean reading of your rate without any traps distorting the number.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg