Death and Mourning

I take the word Europe Or the word death And tear them into tiny pieces; I scatter them at your feet.

I’d like to die like this… with the dark fingers of the water closing and unclosing over these sleepy lights and a sad bell somewhere murmuring good night.

—And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles seventeen years ago come March.

As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being!

One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved.

Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odor of death Offends the September night.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

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.

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.

Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified: The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field Where the seed gets no chance to come through To the fun of the sun. The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.

there are so many people dead and so many sea-walls that the red sun used to split, and so many heads that the boats hit, and so many hands that have closed around kisses, and so many things I would like to forget.

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

At five in the afternoon. Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon! It was five by all the clocks! It was five in the shade of the afternoon!

I will not see it! Tell the moon to come for I do not want to see the blood of Ignacio on the sand.

Black are the horses. The horseshoes are black. On the dark capes glisten stains of ink and of wax. Their skulls are leaden, which is why they don’t weep. With their patent leather souls they come down the street.

Buffalo Bill’s defunct and break onetwothreefourfive pigeons- he was a handsome man how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

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

I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm, On a day I already remember. I shall die in Paris—it does not bother me— Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn. 1

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers The buck in the snow… Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Death devours all lovely things; Lesbia with her sparrow Shares the darkness—presently Every bed is narrow.