Death and Mourning

Bury the Great Duke With an empire’s lamentation.

 

Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side?

 

How fares it with the happy dead?

 

And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land.

 

Dear as remember’d kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

 

Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.

 

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

 

Give us long rest or death, dark death or dreamful ease.

 

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.

 

No life that breathes with human breath Has ever truly longed for death.

 

She said, “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!”

 

There hath he lain for ages and will lie Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep, Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; Then once by man and angels to be seen, In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

 

a fruitless enterprise, a great mistake, a decrepit frenzy, and rightly viewed, a corpse, some dust, a shadow, mere nothingness.

 

Yisterday fair up sprang the flouris, This day thai are all slane with schouris; And fowles in forrest that sang cleir Now walkis with a drery cheir; Full caild are baith thair beddis and bouris.

 

I that in heill wes and gladnes Am trublit now with gret seiknes And feblit with infermite: Timor Mortis conturbat me. 1

 

Death is the enemy. . . . Against you I willfling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, ODeath!

I found myself thinking with intense curiosityabout death. Yet if I’m persuaded of anything, it is of mortality—Then why this sense that death is going to be a great excitement?—somethingpositive, active?

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

The dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the pleasures they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that’s the way I put it—weaned away.

I am dying, as I have lived, beyond my means.

So it goes.

Death twitches my ear. “Live,” he says; “I am coming.”

Manibus date lilia plenis .

Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles .