Death and Mourning

She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: 2 A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!

And the fever called “Living” Is conquered at last.

In mockery of monumental stone.

While the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

About, about, in reel and rout The death fires danced at night.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

We come from not being and march toward not being: nothing between two nothings, zero between two zeros, and since between two nothings nothing can be, let’s drink to the splendor of not being our bodies.

Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.

Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state. There is as little reason to deplore the one as there is to be pleased about the other.

So he passed over, and the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom taking the world into my arms.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last instalment missing.

When I have fears that I may cease to be

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Can storied urn or animated bust

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Alas! that all we loved of him should be,