greykit.poetry — #mortality
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Spring and Fall: to a young child
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.
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1896
[a-e-housman]
Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
Counting his threescore years and ten, the speaker finds fifty springs too few to see the cherry hung with bloom and snow — and resolves to go about the woodlands now.
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1896
[a-e-housman]
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble
The same gale that troubles Wenlock Edge blew through a Roman at Uricon: the tree of man was never quiet, and the gale of life will soon be through this one too.
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1849
[edgar-allan-poe]
A Dream within a Dream
Poe asks whether a life lived as a dream is therefore less real — then stands on a surf-tormented shore, watching the golden sands slip through his fingers, unable to save even one grain from the pitiless wave.
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1848
[john-keats]
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Fear of dying before the pen has gleaned the teeming brain, and of never again looking on the fair creature of an hour — resolved by standing alone on the shore of the wide world until love and fame sink to nothing.
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1820
[john-keats]
Ode to a Nightingale
Keats follows a nightingale's song out of the mortal world into an immortal darkness, then wakes to find the vision fled — was it a dream or a waking?
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1751
[thomas-gray]
An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church-Yard
Dusk in a country churchyard, and the long reckoning of lives that were never given the chance to be famous — mute inglorious Miltons, flowers born to blush unseen — closing on the poet's own epitaph.
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1648
[robert-herrick]
To Daffodils
We weep to see the daffodils go so soon, and then discover we were weeping for ourselves — a spring as short as theirs, dried like the summer's rain or the pearls of morning dew, ne'er to be found again.
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1633
[george-herbert]
Vertue
Day, rose and spring are each praised and then sentenced in the same breath — for thou must die — until only the seasoned timber of a virtuous soul is left standing when the whole world turns to coal.
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1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 146: Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth
The body as a costly mansion on a short lease, gaudily painted while the soul inside starves; the remedy is to let the flesh pine and feed the soul on its loss, buying terms divine — and so feed on Death, that feeds on men.
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1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
Minutes press forward like waves on shingle; Time crowns what it has raised only to transfix it, delving parallels in beauty's brow and mowing everything down — and still the verse expects to stand, praising a worth that outlives the cruel hand.
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1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 65: Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
If sad mortality overwhelms brass and stone and the sea itself, what plea can beauty possibly hold? The sonnet finds one strong hand only — black ink, in which the miracle of a love may still shine bright.
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1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold
Three images of ending — bare boughs where the birds sang, the twilight after sunset, a fire dying on the ashes of its own youth — arrive at the paradox that seeing the end makes the love stronger: to love that well which thou must leave ere long.