Death and Mourning

Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land.

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Out of me unworthy and unknown The vibrations of deathless music.

Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped.

I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever shines, earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments—Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

In her sepulchre there by the sea,

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

[ On Ted Williams’s last baseball game at FenwayPark, Boston, Mass. :] Our noise for someseconds passed beyond excitement into akind of immense open anguish, a cry to besaved. But immortality is nontransferable. Thepapers said that the other players, and eventhe umpires on the field, begged him to comeout and acknowledge us in some way, but henever had and did not now. Gods do not answerletters.

Death has made His darkness beautiful with thee.

 

Give me my Romeo: and, when he shall die,

 

Red lips are not so red As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

O dark dark dark. 7 They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.

as the silent voice of our parents from the country of the dead.

Yes, as my swift days near their goal, ’Tis all that I implore: In life and death a chainless soul, With courage to endure.

 

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

 

Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep. War is kind.

What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life’s page, And be alone on earth, as I am now.

Of this bad world the loveliest and the best Has smiled and said “Good Night,” and gone to rest.

A long illness seems to be placed between life and death, in order to make death a comfort both to those who die and to those who remain.

Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,