Death and Mourning

Once a man’s thirty, he’s already old, He is indeed as good as dead. It’s best to kill him right away.

Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

The absolutes the eternities Their outlying districts Are not my theme I am hungry for life and for death also I know what I know and I write it.

O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed. The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

Look thy last on all things lovely.

Here was the world’s worst wound. And here with pride

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

Life levels all men: death reveals the eminent.

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. . . . Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.

Manibus date lilia plenis .

I shall fall

 

She is coming, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red.

 

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, And in a little while our lips are dumb. Let us alone. What is it that will last? All things are taken from us, and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.

 

O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead?

When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.

Lord, Lord! methought what pain it was to drown: What dreadful noise of water in mine ears! What sights of ugly death within mine eyes! Methought I saw a thousand fearful wracks; A thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon.

No voice divine the storm allayed, When, snatched from all effectual aid, But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!

Word over all, beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world; For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.

White Godiva, I unpeel— Dead hands dead stringencies.