Although the poem went through significant revisions as it appeared in different volumes of Leaves of Grass, the most anthologized and most quoted iteration is the 1860 version’s nine stanzas separated by Roman numerals. Each stanza has a varying number of lines: The shorter stanzas, Stanzas 4 and 7, are when the speaker leans in and directly addresses the reader. These create urgency and immediacy; the longer stanzas, Stanzas 3 and 9, reflect the speaker’s moments of expansive vision, either in space (sweeping across the Manhattan harbor) or across time (feeling the edgy energy of eternity itself).

The poem itself, like all the poems in Leaves of Grass, is open verse. In defiance of conventional concepts of anticipated rhythm and pre-set rhyme schemes, the poem establishes its own organic form. Each line is an independent, self-contained formal expression. The form is defined with three strategies.

First, the poem uses a device known as anaphora in which the speaker deliberately begins a series of lines with the same word or repeats a phrase, for instance, “Others” (Stanza 2), “Just” and “Saw” and “Looked” (Stanza 3); or the phrases “not wanting” (Lines 75, 76) “great and small” (Line 85), and “I too” (Lines 27, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 71).