greykit.poetry — #death
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.