Death and Mourning

What were we? What was that bitter instant We called life?

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Nameless here for evermore.

The Dying, is a trifle, past But living, this include The dying multifold—without The Respite to be dead.

Steep’d amid honey’d morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death.

From those great eyes The soul has fled: When faith is lost, when honor dies, The man is dead!

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still, 8 and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God.

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.

Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow.

Still falls the Rain— Dark as the world of man, black as our loss— Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upon the Cross.

That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment Day.

How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers The buck in the snow… Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all.

After the first death there is no other.

Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honour aspireth to it; grief flieth to it.

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light

I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.

I had seen birth and death

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Fare well my dear child and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends that we may merrily meet in heaven.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,