Calamus 17 Of him I love day and night
A disturbing poem about death, the death of a lover, the death of a city, the death of the poet. And Whitman's own dismissal of death, or at least of memorializing it.
Reading this as someone who grew up in the 80s, I can only read this in reflection on the AIDS crisis. Of my own community's deaths.
And I found that every place was a burial-place,
The houses full of life were equally full of death
The poem doesn't offer any solace in this reading. It is just a marker of death and being exposed to so much death that we are inured to it.