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Walt Whitman: Poems

Walt Whitman: A Dream


Of him I love day and night, I dreamed I heard he was dead;

And I dreamed I went where they had buried him I love--but he was not in

that place;

And I dreamed I wandered, searching among burial-places, to find him;

And I found that every place was a burial-place;

The houses full of life were equally full of death, (this house is now;)

The streets, the shipping, the places of amusement, the Chicago, Boston,

Philadelphia, the Mannahatta, were as full of the dead as of the living,

And fuller, O vastly fuller, of the dead than of the living.

--And what I dreamed I will henceforth tell to every person and age,

And I stand henceforth bound to what I dreamed;

And now I am willing to disregard burial-places, and dispense with them;

And if the memorials of the dead were put up indifferently everywhere, even

in the room where I eat or sleep, I should be satisfied;

And if the corpse of any one I love, or if my own corpse, be duly rendered

to powder, and poured in the sea, I shall be satisfied;

Or if it be distributed to the winds, I shall be satisfied.

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