greykit.poetry — #grief

• 1918 [gerard-manley-hopkins] Spring and Fall: to a young child
  Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Hopkins asks Márgarét, weeping at Goldengrove's unleaving, whether she grieves for the world or for herself — sorrow's springs are the same; it is the blight man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for.

  #lyric#nature#mortality#grief#1910s
• 1896 [a-e-housman] With rue my heart is laden
  A Shropshire Lad

  Eight lines for the golden friends and the light-foot boys and rose-lipt girls, laid by brooks too broad for leaping and in fields where roses fade.

  #lyric#grief#youth#1890s
• 1890 [rudyard-kipling] Ford o’ Kabul River
  Barrack-Room Ballads

  A cavalryman grieves the mate he lost fording the river in the dark.

  #ballad#soldiers#grief#1890s
• 1881 [oscar-wilde] Requiescat
  Poems

  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.

  #elegy#grief#death#lyric#1880s
• 1862 [christina-rossetti] Remember
  Goblin Market and Other Poems

  Rossetti urges her beloved to remember her after death, then revises the plea — better he should forget and smile than remember and be sad.

  #sonnet#memory#death#grief#1860s
• 1850 [alfred-lord-tennyson] In Memoriam A.H.H. (selections)
  In Memoriam

  Selections from Tennyson's great elegiac sequence for Arthur Henry Hallam — spanning the Prologue's address to "Strong Son of God," the dark-house vigil of canto VII, the faith-and-doubt crisis of cantos LIV–LVI, the Ring Out Wild Bells of CVI, and the wedding Epilogue that closes the seventeen-year mourning with new life.

  #elegy#faith#grief#Victorian#1850s
• 1847 [alfred-lord-tennyson] Tears, Idle Tears
  The Princess

  Tears that rise from no known grief but from looking at happy autumn fields and thinking of the days that are no more — fresh as first beams, sad as the last, deep as first love, wild with all regret.

  #lyric#grief#memory#1840s
• 1845 [edgar-allan-poe] The Raven
  The Raven and Other Poems

  A grieving man is visited at midnight by a raven who answers every question with the one word "Nevermore," driving him to the edge of madness over his lost Lenore.

  #gothic#narrative#loss#grief#1840s
• 1842 [alfred-lord-tennyson] Break, Break, Break
  Poems (1842)

  Waves break on cold gray stones — the fisherman's boy shouts, the sailor lad sings, the stately ships go on, but the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me.

  #lyric#elegy#grief#sea#1840s
• 1802 [samuel-taylor-coleridge] Dejection: An Ode
  Sibylline Leaves

  Wrestling with creative paralysis and emotional deadness, Coleridge addresses an unnamed Lady, lamenting that joy must come from within the soul before it can be found in nature.

  #ode#meditation#grief#nature#1800s
• 1638 [john-milton] Lycidas
  Poems of Mr. John Milton

  A pastoral elegy for a college contemporary drowned in the Irish Sea, which breaks off mid-lament to arraign the corrupt clergy of the age — the two-handed engine at the door — before rising into consolation and turning away to fresh woods and pastures new.

  #elegy#pastoral#grief#1630s
• 1609 [william-shakespeare] Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
  Shakespeare’s Sonnets

  Memory convened like a court: the speaker summons up remembrance of things past, re-weeps friends long dead and pays old griefs over again as if they had never been settled — until one thought of a dear friend cancels the whole account.

  #sonnet#grief#memory#1600s