Of Him I Love Day and Night
Of him I love day and night, I dreamd I heard he was dead;
And I dreamd I went where they had buried him I lovebut he was not in that
place;
And I dreamd I wanderd, 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 dreamd I will henceforth tell to every person and age,
And I stand henceforth bound to what I dreamd;
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 renderd to powder,
and
pourd in the sea, I shall be satisfied;
Or if it be distributed to the winds, I shall be satisfied.
Poems by Walt Whitman
