University of Virginia Library

17.

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, of 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.