“Hours Continuing Long” made its first appearance as one of 12 poems that Whitman carefully copied into a notebook in the spring of 1859. He numbered them in Roman numerals, suggesting that he saw them as forming an interrelated cluster of poems, which he titled “Live Oak, with Moss,” a title taken from the second of these poems, “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing.” “Hours Continuing Long” was number VIII in the sequence. The group of poems tells the story of a love relationship between the speaker, Whitman, and an unnamed man that begins in happiness (poems I to VII) but ends in an estrangement (poem VIII). In the remaining poems, Whitman seeks consolation and hope for the future.

All these poems found their way into the “Calamus” section in the third edition of Leaves of Grass in 1860, but they were distributed throughout the 45-poem section in a way that obscured their original connection. Perhaps Whitman thought that as it stood, the sequence was too bold and too intimate in the way it presented same-sex love. He intended the “Calamus” section to celebrate male friendship, what he called “the dear love of comrades” (“I Hear it was Charged Against Me”), “adhesiveness” (“Song of the Open Road”), and “manly attachment” (“In Paths Untrodden”), notions to which no one could object (and no one did).