Death poems
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The Departed
© Edgar Albert Guest
IF no one ever went ahead,
If we had seen no friend depart
And mourned him for a while as dead,
How great would be our fear to start.
The Lady Of La Garaye - Prologue
© Caroline Norton
This was the Chapel: that the stair:
Here, where all lies damp and bare,
The fragrant thurible was swung,
The silver lamp in beauty hung,
And in that mass of ivied shade
The pale nuns sang--the abbot prayed.
Dust
© Rupert Brooke
When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world's delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;
After Looking into Carlyles Reminiscences
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
I.
THREE MEN lived yet when this dead man was young
My skeleton, my rival
© David Ignatow
Interesting that I have to live with my skeleton.
It stands, prepared to emerge, and I carry it
with me—this other thing I will become at death,
and yet it keeps me erect and limber in my walk,
my rival.
Streamers
© Wole Soyinka
1 As an archaeologist unearths a mask with opercular teeth
and abalone eyes, someone throws a broken fan and extension
cords
into a dumpster. A point of coincidence exists in the mind
A Poem: To The Memory of Mrs. Oldfield
© Richard Savage
Oldfield's no more!-And can the Muse forbear,
O'er Oldfield's Grave to shed a grateful Tear?
Ode Read At The One Hundreth Anniversary Of The Fight At Concord Bridge
© James Russell Lowell
I
Who cometh over the hills,
A Summer Garden
© Louise Gluck
1
Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.
The sun was shining. The dogs
were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,
calm and unmoving as in all photographs.
Sonnet To George Keats: Written In Sickness
© John Keats
Brother belov'd if health shall smile again,
Upon this wasted form and fever'd cheek:
If e'er returning vigour bid these weak
And languid limbs their gladsome strength regain,
from The Vanity of Human Wishes
© Henry James Pye
Yet still one genral cry the skies assails,
And gain and grandeur load the tainted gales,
Few know the toiling statesmans fear or care,
Th insidious rival and the gaping heir.
from The Bridge: The Tunnel
© Hart Crane
Or can’t you quite make up your mind to ride;
A walk is better underneath the L a brisk
Ten blocks or so before? But you find yourself
Preparing penguin flexions of the arms,—
As usual you will meet the scuttle yawn:
The subway yawns the quickest promise home.
Venus of the Louvre
© Emma Lazarus
Down the long hall she glistens like a star,
The foam-born mother of Love, transfixed to stone,
Two Robbers
© Francis William Bourdillon
When Death from some fair face
Is stealing life away,
All weep, save she, the grace
That earth shall lose today.
The Bounty
© Derek Walcott
Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true
Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah’s elations
force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto
Death Sonnet I
© Gabriela Mistral
From the icy niche where men placed you
I lower your body to the sunny, poor earth.
They didn't know I too must sleep in it
and dream on the same pillow.
The Death of Allegory
© Billy Collins
I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions
that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings
and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance
displaying their capital letters like license plates.
