Death and Mourning

Vex not his ghost: O! let him pass; he hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer.

And sleep in dull cold marble.

For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night, Devoid of sense and motion?

Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen, Fallen from his high estate, And welt’ring in his blood; Deserted, at his utmost need, By those his former bounty fed, On the bare earth expos’d he lies, With not a friend to close his eyes.

Death… on his pale horse.

Death in itself is nothing; but we fear To be we know not what, we know not where.

Vain was the chief’s, the sage’s pride! They had no poet, and they died. 7

And come he slow, or come he fast, It is but Death who comes at last.

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown.

Ah woe is me! Winter is come and gone, But grief returns with the revolving year.

But never met this Fellow Attended or alone Without a tighter breathing And Zero at the Bone—

The Bustle in a House The Morning after Death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon Earth— The Sweeping up the Heart, And putting Love away We shall not want to use again Until Eternity.

Creep into thy narrow bed, Creep, and let no more be said!

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Who knows but the world may end tonight?

The time. Redeem The unread vision in the higher dream While jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.

A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

If the red slayer think he slays,

He’d make a lovely corpse.

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,

He saw; but blasted with excess of light,