Artist Allen Crawford creates 256 pages of hand-drawn illustrations together to light on the centerpiece of Whitman's titanic Leaves of Grass in his absolutely gorgeous Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself. 

Song of Myself

VI

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
	hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any
	more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
	green stuff woven.

Or I guess if is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we
	may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of 
	the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
	zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
	same, I receive then the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
	soon out of their mother’s laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
	mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
	for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
	and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
	taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and
	children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
	at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
	luckier.