A Few Scented Lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

 

In honor of the bicentennial of Walt Whitman’s birth!

 

2.

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,

I breathe the fragrance myself and I know it and like it,

The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

 

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,

It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,

I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,

I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892), excerpt from “Song of Myself”

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