Death and Mourning

The true beginning of our end. 10

Call for the robin redbreast and the wren, Since o’er shady groves they hover, And with leaves and flowers do cover The friendless bodies of unburied men.

O fairest of creation! last and best Of all God’s works! creature in whom excell’d Whatever can to sight or thought be form’d, Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet! How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost, Defac’d, deflower’d, and now to Death devote?

At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls.

For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor; So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed; And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky. So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves.

And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald.

O’er all the hilltops Is quiet now, In all the treetops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees: Wait; soon like these Thou too shalt rest. 16

When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry ’weep! ’weep! ’weep! ’weep! So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— To thy high requiem become a sod.

Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!

We have imagined for the mighty dead.

The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last!

A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose.

Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset touch, A fancy from a flower bell, someone’s death, A chorus ending from Euripides.

Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

You never know what life means till you die: Even throughout life, ’tis death that makes life live, Gives it whatever the significance.

Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?

What the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

What then remains, but that we still should cry,

However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.