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Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,

The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail’d,

And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor,

And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages,

And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo, then and there,

Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,

Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail,

And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.

From "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d" by Walt Whitman.

What is the meaning of pent here?

Lexico says it is an adjective and another term for pent-up, means:

  1. unable to be expressed or released.

  2. Closely confined or held back.

And Webster:

shut up : CONFINED, REPRESSED

Improve this question
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  • Please add a little following context, and an attributed link*. Also which dictionaries haven't given a more logical alternative sense. // *If it's by an old classmate of mine, it's probably just there to sound classy.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jan 10, 2020 at 19:53
  • 1
    @EdwinAshworth I added what you wanted.
    – Connoisseur
    Commented Jan 10, 2020 at 20:00
  • 2
    It is a post-positioned adjective. As in something like: the cities black, all filled with soot. That kind of thing. So, it's the pent cities i.e., confined. As a poet, Walt Whitman for some reason really gets on my nerves. Maybe because he was a bohemian or hippy in an era where there weren't any. So some of his poems sound like a mixture of tea and fish.
    – Lambie
    Commented Jan 10, 2020 at 20:27
  • 3
    It's an old weak irregular participle of pen (v), a causative meaning 'to cause to come to be in a pen'. It's equivalent to (and pronounced like) penned.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Jan 10, 2020 at 21:20
  • 1
    ... pronounced like "penned", except ending with a "t" sound.
    – ProfDFrancis
    Commented Jan 10, 2020 at 23:29

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