greykit.poetry — #death
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Felix Randal
A priest's elegy for a farrier he anointed — the big-boned and hardy-handsome man broken by sickness, tears touched by a child's touch, and at the last the great grey drayhorse and the bright and battering sandal.
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1898
[oscar-wilde]
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Wilde's long narrative poem in six cantos about the hanging of a soldier at Reading Gaol — anchored in the refrain that each man kills the thing he loves, by each let this be heard.
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1896
[emily-dickinson]
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
In the stillness before death, eyes dry, breaths gathering for the last onset — and then a fly interposes with blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz between the light and me, and the windows failed.
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1896
[a-e-housman]
To an Athlete Dying Young
A Shropshire lad mourns a young runner carried home shoulder-high in triumph, and again shoulder-high in death — lucky, Housman suggests, to slip away before the garland withers and the name outlives the fame.
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1890
[emily-dickinson]
Because I could not stop for Death—
Death comes as a courteous gentleman who drives the poet past schoolchildren at play, gazing grain, and a house that seems a swelling of the ground, until centuries feel shorter than a single day.
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1889
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
Crossing the Bar
Tennyson's valedictory lyric — written in a single sitting, placed by his own wish at the close of every volume of his work — hopes for no mourning when the tide bears him out, and to see his Pilot face to face.
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1887
[robert-louis-stevenson]
Requiem
Stevenson's eight-line epitaph for himself — under the wide and starry sky, glad did I live and gladly die; home is the sailor; home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill.
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1881
[oscar-wilde]
Requiescat
Wilde's elegy for his sister Isola, who died aged nine — tread lightly, speak gently; all her bright golden hair tarnished with rust, all his life's buried here.
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1865
[walt-whitman]
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Whitman's great elegy for Lincoln — the lilac's perennial bloom, the drooping western star, and the hermit thrush singing death's carol in the swamps; the poem that transformed a president's death into a national rite of mourning.
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1864
[robert-browning]
Prospice
Written after his wife's death: no wish for the bandage or the creeping past — he would fare like his peers, take the last worst of it fighting, and have the black minute end in her breast, and peace out of pain.
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1862
[christina-rossetti]
Remember
Rossetti urges her beloved to remember her after death, then revises the plea — better he should forget and smile than remember and be sad.
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1862
[christina-rossetti]
Up-Hill
A traveller's questions and a steady voice answering: the road winds uphill all the way, the journey takes the whole long day, and yes — there will be beds for all who come.
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1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
Eldorado
A gallant knight grows old riding after Eldorado, and is finally told by a pilgrim shadow where to look: over the Mountains of the Moon, down the Valley of the Shadow.
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1845
[edgar-allan-poe]
The City in the Sea
Death has reared himself a throne in a strange city far down within the dim West, where no heaven-light reaches and no wind disturbs the melancholy waters — until Hell itself shall rise to do that sunken city reverence.
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1843
[edgar-allan-poe]
Lenore
A mourner refuses to sing a dirge for Lenore — who died so young, doubly dead — and rebukes those who loved her for wealth and hated her for pride; the poem closes with a defiant pæan, sending the angel up to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven.
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1633
[john-donne]
Holy Sonnet X: Death be not proud
Death is addressed to its face and steadily demoted — from dreadful power to a slave of fate and chance, no better than poppy or charms at bringing sleep — until the last line kills it outright.