Death and Mourning

The long mysterious Exodus of death.

Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman’s Woe!

But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.

Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.

“Guess now who holds thee?”—“Death,” I said. But there The silver answer rang—“Not Death, but Love.”

Knowledge by suffering entereth, And life is perfected by death.

If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. 1

“Pass in, pass in,” the angels say, “In to the upper doors, Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to paradise By the stairway of surprise.”

What were we? What was that bitter instant We called life?

So we keep asking, over and over, Until a handful of earth Stops our mouths— But is that an answer?

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.

I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!”

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is— I hold it towards you.

My spirit is too weak—mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagin’d pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky. 2

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.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

We have imagined for the mighty dead.

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odors, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the beloved’s bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.

The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

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!

He is a portion of the loveliness Which once he made more lovely.

He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird.

He lives, he wakes—’tis Death is dead, not he.