Death and Mourning

Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius; please pay it and don’t forget it.

And come he slow, or come he fast,

She lived unknown, and few could know

No one ever dies an atheist.

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

Death takes no bribes.

Yisterday fair up sprang the flouris, This day thai are all slane with schouris; And fowles in forrest that sang cleir Now walkis with a drery cheir; Full caild are baith thair beddis and bouris.

 

For though from out our bourne of time and place

 

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

 

From the great deep to the great deep he goes.

 

Timor mortis conturbat me.

 

No life that breathes with human breath Has ever truly longed for death.

 

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life.

Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.

What is this world? what asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave Allone, withouten any compaignye.

When good men die their goodness does not perish, But lives though they are gone. As for the bad, All that was theirs dies and is buried with them.

Let the dozing soul remember, let the mind awake and revive by contemplating how our life goes by so swiftly and how our death comes near so silently; how quickly pleasure fades, and how when it is recalled it give us pain, how we seem always to think that times past must have been better than today.

O sun! Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in; darkling stand The varying shore o’ the world.

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so That heaven’s vaults should crack. She’s gone forever.

Is the chair empty? is the sword unsway’d? Is the king dead? the empire unpossess’d?

Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit.

I have touch’d the highest point of all my greatness; And from that full meridian of my glory, I haste now to my setting: I shall fall Like a bright exhalation in the evening, And no man see me more.

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.