Poems about Death: Whitman, Wilcox, Millay
Posted: March 25, 2016 Filed under: Edna St.Vincent Millay, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Walt Whitman | Tags: Poems about Death Comments Off on Poems about Death: Whitman, Wilcox, Millay
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
To One Shortly to Die
.
From all the rest I single out you, having a message for you,
You are to die –– let others tell you what they please, I cannot prevaricate,
I am exact and merciless, but I love you –– there is no escape for you.
.
Softly I lay my right hand upon you, you must feel it,
I do not argue, I bend my head close and half envelop it,
I sit quietly by, I remain faithful,
I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbour,
I absolve you from all except yourself spiritual bodily, that is
eternal, you yourself will surely escape,
The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.
.
The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions,
Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile,
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
You do not see the medicines, you do not mind the weeping friends,
I am with you,
I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated,
I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.
. . .
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)
My Grave
.
If, when I die, I must be buried, let
No cemetery engulf me – no lone grot,
Where the great palpitating world comes not,
Save when, with heart bowed down and eyelids wet,
It pays its last sad melancholy debt
To some outjourneying pilgrim. May my lot
Be rather to lie in some much-used spot,
Where human life, with all its noise and fret,
Throbs about me. Let the roll of wheels,
With all earth’s sounds of pleasure, commerce, love,
And rush of hurrying feet surge o’er my head.
Even in my grave I shall be one who feels
Close kinship with the pulsing world above;
And too deep silence would distress me, dead.
. . .
Edna St.Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
The Shroud
.
Death, I say, my heart is bowed
Unto thine – O mother!
This red gown will make a shroud
Good as any other!
.
(I, that would not wait to wear
My own bridal things,
In a dress dark as my hair
Made my answerings.
.
I, tonight, that till he came
Could not, could not wait,
In a gown as bright as flame
Held for them the gate.)
.
Death, I say, my heart is bowed
Unto thine – O mother!
This red gown will make a shroud
Good as any other!
. . .
Edna St.Vincent Millay
Lament
.
Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I’ll make you little jackets;
I’ll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There’ll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.
. . . . .
Thanksgiving Poems: a Cornucopia
Posted: November 28, 2013 Filed under: Emily Dickinson, English, Guido Guinizelli, Gwendolyn Brooks, Henri Nouwen, Luci Shaw, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Rabindranath Tagore, Walt Whitman, William Matthews | Tags: Thanksgiving poems, Thanksgiving: USA Comments Off on Thanksgiving Poems: a Cornucopia
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
“I had no time to Hate”
.
I had no time to Hate –
Because
The Grave would hinder Me –
And Life was not so
Ample I
Could finish – Enmity –
.
Nor had I time to Love –
But since
Some Industry must be –
The little Toil of Love –
I thought
Be large enough for Me –
. . .
Emily Dickinson
“They might not need me – yet they might”
.
They might not need me – yet they might –
I’ll let my Heart be just in sight –
A smile so small as mine might be
Precisely their necessity.
Emily Dickinson
“Who has not found the Heaven – below”
.
Who has not found the Heaven – below –
Will fail of it above –
For Angels rent the House next ours,
Wherever we remove –
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
“A Prayer”
.
O Lord, the hard-won miles
Have worn my stumbling feet:
Oh, soothe me with thy smiles,
And make my life complete.
.
The thorns were thick and keen
Where’er I trembling trod;
The way was long between
My wounded feet and God.
.
Where healing waters flow
Do thou my footsteps lead.
My heart is aching so;
Thy gracious balm I need.
. . .
Paul Laurence Dunbar
“The Sum”
.
A little dreaming by the way,
A little toiling day by day;
A little pain, a little strife,
A little joy,–and that is life.
.
A little short-lived summer’s morn,
When joy seems all so newly born,
When one day’s sky is blue above,
And one bird sings,–and that is love.
.
A little sickening of the years,
The tribute of a few hot tears,
Two folded hands, the failing breath,
And peace at last,–and that is death.
.
Just dreaming, loving, dying so,
The actors in the drama go–
A flitting picture on a wall,
Love, Death, the themes; but is that all?
. . .
Guido Guinizelli (1230-1276)
“Of Moderation and Tolerance”
.
He that has grown to wisdom hurries not,
But thinks and weighs what Reason bids him do;
And after thinking he retains his thought
Until as he conceived the fact ensue.
Let no man to o’erweening pride be wrought,
But count his state as Fortune’s gift and due.
He is a fool who deems that none has sought
The truth, save he alone, or knows it true.
Many strange birds are on the air abroad,
Nor all are of one flight or of one force,
But each after his kind dissimilar:
To each was portion’d of the breath of God,
Who gave them divers instincts from one source.
Then judge not thou thy fellows what they are.
.
Translation from the Italian: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1861)
. . .
Luci Shaw (born 1928)
“But not forgotten”
.
Whether or not I find the missing thing
it will always be
more than my thought of it.
Silver-heavy, somewhere it winks
in its own small privacy
playing
the waiting game for me.
.
And the real treasures do not vanish.
The precious loses no value
in the spending.
A piece of hope spins out
bright, along the dark, and is not
lost in space;
verity is a burning boomerang;
love is out orbiting and will
come home.
. . .
Henri Nouwen (1932-1996)
“Hope”
.
Hope means to keep living
amid desperation,
and to keep humming in darkness.
Hoping is knowing that there is love,
it is trust in tomorrow
it is falling asleep
and waking again
when the sun rises.
In the midst of a gale at sea,
it is to discover land.
In the eye of another
it is to see that he understands you.
As long as there is still hope
there will also be prayer.
And God will be holding you
in His hands.
. . .
Walt Whitman(1819-1892)
“When I heard the learn’d astronomer”
.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
“Speech to the Young, Speech to the Progress-Toward
(Among them Nora and Henry III)”
.
Say to them
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers:
“Even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.”
You will be right.
For that is the hard home-run.
Live not for the battles won.
Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
Live in the along.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
“Closed Path”
.
I thought that my voyage had come to its end
at the last limit of my power,
that the path before me was closed,
that provisions were exhausted,
and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.
.
But I find that Thy Will knows no end in me.
And when old words die out on the tongue,
new melodies break forth from the heart;
and where the old tracks are lost,
new country is revealed with its wonders.
. . .
William Matthews (1942-1997)
“Onions”
.
How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.
.
This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see
.
clearly the cataracts in them.
It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-coloured and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least
.
recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest
.
and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare
.
and rage and murmury animal
comfort that infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumour
of onions still on your twice-washed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint
.
of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It’s there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.
. . . . .
Walt Whitman: “Living always, always dying”
Posted: November 2, 2011 Filed under: English, Walt Whitman Comments Off on Walt Whitman: “Living always, always dying”
ZP_Walt Whitman with Peter Doyle who was, quite possibly, his lover_1869
.
Of him I love day and night
.
Of him I love day and night I dream’d I heard he was dead,
And I dream’d I went where they had buried him I love, but he was
not in that place.
And I dream’d I wander’d searching among burial-places to find him,
And I found that every place was a burial-place;
The houses full of life were equally full of death, (this house is, now,)
The streets, the shipping, the places of amusement, the Chicago,
Boston, Philadelphia, the Mannahatta *, were as full of the dead
as of the living.
And fuller, O vastly fuller of the dead than of the living;
And what I dream’d I will henceforth tell to every person and age,
And I stand henceforth bound to what I dream’d,
And now I am willing to disregard burial-places and dispense with
them,
And if the memorials of the dead were put up indifferently
everywhere, even in the room where I eat or sleep, I should be
satisfied.
And if the corpse of any one I love, or if my own corpse, be duly
render’d to powder and pour’d in the sea, I shall be satisfied,
Or if it be distributed to the winds I shall be satisfied.
.
* Mannahatta – the original Delaware/Algonquin Native name
for Manhattan
_____
O Living Always, Always Dying
.
O living always, always dying!
O the burials of me past and present,
O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look
at where I cast them,
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.
ZP_1886 photograph of Walt Whitman with Bill Duckett
.
Walt Whitman was born in 1819, at Long Island, New York.
By his mid-teens he was working as a typesetter in Brooklyn
and began to contribute juvenilia to newspapers.
At twenty he was a schoolteacher but being a
restless fellow, one to get fired, or to quit, he went from job
to job, writing being the only steady thing.
His poetry collection “Leaves of Grass”, from 1855, is considered
a cornerstone in what might now be called “the American voice”
– plain-spoken and egalitarian – yet grandiose and self-centred, too.
Whitman is the 19th-century father of free-verse poetry in the
English language, basing the form and cadence of his poems
on the Psalms of the King James Bible.
The two poems featured above take the Victorian-era (even in the U.S.)
morbid maudlinism surrounding Death and give it a 180-degree turn.
Whitman died in 1892.
Zócalo Poets 