greykit.poetry — #elegy
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns — no mockeries, no prayers; their only memorial the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
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1920
[wilfred-owen]
Futility
Move him into the sun — it woke him always, even in France, until this morning and this snow; was it for this the clay grew tall? — O what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all?
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1916
[w-b-yeats]
Easter, 1916
Yeats's elegy for the leaders of the Easter Rising — men he had passed with a nod, transformed utterly by their sacrifice into a terrible beauty that is born.
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1912
[thomas-hardy]
The Convergence of the Twain
Hardy's cold meditation on the Titanic and the iceberg, grown in shadowy distance as twin halves of one august event, until the Spinner of the Years said "Now!" and jarred two hemispheres.
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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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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]
O Captain! My Captain!
Whitman's elegy for Lincoln as fallen ship's captain — the voyage won and the port in sight, but the Captain lies cold and dead on the deck while the crowds exult on shore.
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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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1850
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
In Memoriam A.H.H. (selections)
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.
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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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1842
[alfred-lord-tennyson]
Break, Break, Break
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.
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1821
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
Adonais
Shelley's pastoral elegy for John Keats in 55 Spenserian stanzas — mourning the death of genius at the hands of hostile critics, tracing the mourning of Urania and Keats's fellow-poets, and arriving at the vision of Adonais absorbed into the eternal One, a star beaconing from the abode where the Eternal are.