Death poems
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The Dream
© Caroline Norton
Ah! bless'd are they for whom 'mid all their pains
That faithful and unalter'd love remains;
Who, Life wreck'd round them,--hunted from their rest,--
And, by all else forsaken or distress'd,--
Claim, in one heart, their sanctuary and shrine--
As I, my Mother, claim'd my place in thine!
Reading Saint John of the Cross
© Susan Kelly-DeWitt
How many miles to the border
where all the sky there is
exists for the soul alone?
Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg
© André Breton
When first, descending from the moorlands,
I saw the Stream of Yarrow glide
Along a bare and open valley,
The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide.
Nightmare Number Three
© Stephen Vincent Benet
We had expected everything but revolt
And I kind of wonder myself when they started thinking--
from The Prelude: Book 2: School-time (Continued)
© André Breton
Fare Thee well!
Health, and the quiet of a healthful mind
Attend thee! seeking oft the haunts of men,
And yet more often living with Thyself,
And for Thyself, so haply shall thy days
Be many, and a blessing to mankind.
The Winding Stair
© William Butler Yeats
My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
The African Prince
© Letitia Elizabeth Landon
IT was a king in Africa,
He had an only son;
And none of Europe's crowned kings
Could have a dearer one.
from The Faerie Queene: Book I, Canto I
© Edmund Spenser
Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds,
Elegy X
© Rainer Maria Rilke
Yet the dead youth must go on alone.
In silence the elder Lament brings him
as far as the gorge where it shimmers in the moonlight:
The Foutainhead of Joy. With reverance she names it,
saying: "In the world of mankind it is a life-bearing stream."
Tristram And Iseult
© Matthew Arnold
Tristram. Is she not come? The messenger was sure
Prop me upon the pillows once again
Raise me, my page! this cannot long endure.
Christ, what a night! how the sleet whips the pane!
What lights will those out to the northward be?
The Harp
© Aline Murray Kilmer
I HAVE a harp of many strings
But two are enough for me:
One is for love and one for death;
And what would the third one be?
The Idols
© Robert Laurence Binyon
I.2
The Forests of the Night awaken blind in heat
Of black stupor; and stirring in its deep retreat,
I hear the heart of Darkness slowly beat and beat.
The One Certainty
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith,
All things are vanity. The eye and ear
Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain
© Louis Simpson
. . . life which does not give the preference to any other life, of any
previous period, which therefore prefers its own existence . . .
Ortega y Gasset
Save The Boys
© Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
But they heard no cry of anguish
Break through that fiery wall,
With rigid brow and silent lips
He was seeking Odin's hall.
The Cloth of the Tempest
© Kenneth Patchen
These of living emanate a formidable light,
Which is equal to death, and when used
Clouds
© Denise Levertov
The clouds as I see them, rising
urgently, roseate in the
mounting of somber power
Amusing Our Daughters
© John Betjeman
after Po Chü-i,
for Robert Creeley
We don’t lack people here on the Northern coast,
But they are people one meets, not people one cares for.
So I bundle my daughters into the car
And with my brother poets, go to visit you, brother.
Ancapagari
© Carolyn Forche
In the morning of the tribe this name Ancapagari was given to these mountains. The name, then alive, spread into the world and never returned. Ancapagari: no foot-step ever spoken, no mule deer killed from its foothold, left for dead. Ancapagari opened the stones. Pine roots gripped peak rock with their claws. Water dug into the earth and vanished, boiling up again in another place. The water was bitten by aspen, generations of aspen shot their light colored trunks into space. Ancapagari. At that time, if the whisper was in your mouth, you were lighted.
Now these people are buried. The root-taking, finished. Buried in everything, thousands taken root. The roots swell, nesting. Openings widen for the roots to surface.
They sway within you in steady wind of your breath. You are forever swinging between this being and another, one being and another. There is a word for it crawling in your mouth each night. Speak it.
Ancapagari has circled, returned to these highlands. The yellow pines deathless, the sparrow hawks scull, the waters are going numb. Ancapagari longs to be spoken in each tongue. It is the name of the god who has come from among us.
