DO NOT GO GENTLE
poems for funerals
This wide-ranging selection combines popular choices of traditional poems read at funerals with powerful poems by contemporary writers more tuned to our present age of doubt and disbelief.
There are poems here for churchgoers and believers, including classic verses of grief and consolation by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, the anonymous Do not stand at my grave and weep, and the poems read at Princess Diana’s funeral. But there are also poems for people of all faiths and religions, for agnostics and atheists, and most importantly for those who aren’t sure what they believe, whose grief over loss is the more intense for not knowing what happens to the soul after death.
Grief isn’t denied but experienced and made more bearable by being put into memorable words. Searing poems of lament are followed by moving elegies celebrating the lives of those we will always love. Whether and how the spirit survives is then explored in an extraordinary gathering of poems by writers as different and diverse as the Persian mystic Rumi, Zen Buddhist composers of Japanese haiku, and American poets Mary Oliver and Jane Kenyon.
Buttressed against their assertions of faith in an afterlife are modern sceptics, from Auden and Larkin to William Carlos Williams and C.K. Williams, whose wrestling with the meaning of death helps us make sense of no sense, mirroring our own anxieties and difficulties. But however various and contradictory these poems, their message chimes with Larkin’s famous words, proving ‘Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.’
Unlike other poetry anthologies of loss, mourning and remembrance, Do Not Go Gentle offers a selection of poems specifically for reading at funerals and memorial services. It can also be used for reading aloud to friends and family, or for reading while numbed and bewildered – all times when the right poem can help us share and bear the burden of immediate grief.
Cover photograph by Simon Fraser
DO NOT GO GENTLE
poems for funerals
edited by
NEIL ASTLEY
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up.
A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.
A time to get and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast away.
A time to rend and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.
A time to love and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all the breath; so that man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.
KING JAMES BIBLE: ECCLESIASTES
What is born will die,
What has been gathered will be dispersed,
What has been accumulated will be exhausted,
What has been built up will collapse
And what has been high will be brought low.
TRADITIONAL BUDDHIST SCRIPTURE
CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
1 Stop All the Clocks
POEMS OF GRIEF
W.H. Auden Funeral Blues
C.K. Williams Wept
Norman MacCaig Memorial
R.S. Thomas Comparisons
Christina Rossetti Remember
Linda Pastan The Five Stages of Grief
Rudyard Kipling The Widower
Janet Frame The Suicides
George Herbert Life
Robert Herrick Epitaph Upon A Child That Died
Edwin Muir The Child Dying
Ben Jonson On My First Sonne
Hugh O’Donnell Light
D.J. Enright On the Death of a Child
Anonymous The Unquiet Grave
Emily Brontë Remembrance
James Russell Lowell After the Burial
Adrian Mitchell Especially When It Snows
2 Lives Enriched
POEMS OF CELEBRATION
Edgar A. Guest Because He Lived
Robert Burns Epitaph on a Friend
Brendan Kennelly The Good
Stephen Dobyns When a Friend
William Shakespeare Cleopatra’s Lament for Antony
William Shakespeare Dirge for Fidele
David Constantine ‘We say the dead depart’
Anonymous ‘Not, how did he die, but how did he live?’
Alfred, Lord Tennyson FROM In Memoriam A.H.H.
Langston Hughes As Befits a Man
Joyce Grenfell FROM Joyce: By Herself and Her Friends
William Carlos Williams Tract
Raymond Carver Gravy
BashÅ Haiku
3 I Am Not There
BODY & SPIRIT
Anonymous ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’
Christina Rossetti Song
Mary Lee Hall Turn Again to Life
Henry van Dyke For Katrina’s Sun Dial
Bhartrhari ‘Thinking I enjoyed the pleasures of life’
D.H. Lawrence Demiurge
Gail Holst-Warhaft In the End Is the Body
Pablo Neruda Sonnet LXXXIX
Issa Haiku
Abu al-Ala al-Ma‘arri The Soul Driven from the Body
Devara Dasimayya ‘I’m the one who has the body’
Ruth Pitter The Paradox
Rumi ‘Everything you see’
4 The Dying of the Light
PAIN & RESOLUTION
Dylan Thomas Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
W.E. Henley Invictus
David Wright Et in Arcadia
Pamela Gillilan FROM When You Died
Philip Larkin Aubade
C.K. Williams FROM Le Petit Salvié
Anne Stevenson The Minister
Virginia Hamilton Adair A Last Marriage
5 The Other Side
COMFORT & HAUNTING
Jane Kenyon Notes from the Other Side
Thom Gunn The Reassurance
Patricia Pogson Breath
C.K. Williams Oh
Ken Smith Years go by
Brendan Kennelly I See You Dancing, Father
Patrick Kavanagh In Memory of My Mother
Billy Collins The Dead
Vladimír Holan Resurrection
Charles Causley Eden Rock
Jeanne Willis Inside Our Dreams
Meera Song
Shiki Haiku
6 Nothing Dies
RELEASE & LETTING GO
Emily Dickinson After Great Pain
Mary Oliver In Blackwater Woods
Walt Whitman FROM Song of Myself
Rumi Unmarked Boxes
Mona Van Duyn The Creation
Thomas Hardy Heredity
Alice Walker ‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’
David Ignatow Kaddish
R.S. Thomas A Marriage
Wendell Berry Three Elegiac Poems
Jane Kenyon In the Nursing Home
Rumi ‘Why cling’
Mary Oliver When Death Comes
Stevie Smith Come, Death
John Donne ‘Death be not proud’
Anne Ridler Nothing Is Lost
Jane Kenyon Let Evening Come
Louis MacNeice FROM Autumn Journal
Anonymous A Celtic Blessing
Raymond Carver No Need
Alden Nowlan This Is What I Wanted to Sign Off With
Raymond Carver Late Fragment
&
nbsp; Pablo Neruda Dead Woman
Kaniyan Punkunran Every Town a Home Town
Brendan Kennelly Begin
Acknowledgements
Index of writers
Copyright
1
Stop All the Clocks
POEMS OF GRIEF
Come sorrow, come! bring all thy cries,
All thy laments, and all thy weeping eyes!
Burn out, you living monuments of woe!
Sad sullen griefs, now rise and overflow!
JOHN FLETCHER
It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.
FRANCIS BACON
To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Why do atheists have to say that one cannot rise from the dead? Which is the more difficult, to be born or to be reborn? That that which has never existed should exist, or that that which has existed should exist again? Is it more difficult to come into being than to return to it?
PASCAL
THE RIGHT POEM can help us share and bear the burden of immediate grief. The poems in this first section are deeply felt laments for loved ones. Each loss is particular to each writer, but the feelings evoked are universal, whether the person mourned is a parent or partner, child or close friend; and it may not matter who wrote a poem which speaks to you. George Herbert was a 17th-century country parson, but his poem ‘Life’ (17) has brought comfort to many agnostic parents who have lost children. When people find it difficult to talk, a poem’s direct language can give voice to everyone’s bewilderment. Reading it aloud, or hearing it read, may seem to open the wound but the intensity of that openly collective experience brings everyone closer as the poem’s words speak for all.
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
W.H. AUDEN (1907-73)
Wept
(FROM Elegy for an Artist)
though, and not just absence,
never such a sense
of violated presence,
so much desolation,
so many desperate
last hopes refuted,
never such pure despair.
Surely I know by now
that each death demands
its own procedures
of mourning, but I can’t
find those I need even
to begin mourning you:
so much affectionate
accord there was with you,
that to imagine
being without you
is impossibly
diminishing; I relied
on you to ratify
me, to reflect
and sanction with your life
who I might be in mine.
So restorative you were,
so much a response:
untenable that
the part of me you shared
with me shouldn’t have you
actively a part of it.
Never so much absence,
so many longings ash,
as you are ash. Never
so cruel the cry within,
Will I never again
be with you? Ash. Ash.
C.K. WILLIAMS (b. 1936)
(for Bruce McGrew, 1937-99)
Memorial
Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies.
No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain
but has her death in it.
The silence of her dying sounds through
the carousel of language, it’s a web
on which laughter stitches itself. How can my hand
clasp another’s when between them
is that thick death, that intolerable distance?
She grieves for my grief. Dying, she tells me
that bird dives from the sun, that fish
leaps into it. No crocus is carved more gently
than the way her dying
shapes my mind. But I hear, too,
the other words,
black words that make the sound
of soundlessness, that name the nowhere
she is continuously going into.
Ever since she died
she can’t stop dying. She makes me
her elegy. I am a walking masterpiece,
a true fiction
of the ugliness of death.
I am her sad music.
NORMAN MACCAIG (1910-96)
Comparisons
To all light things
I compared her; to
a snowflake, a feather.
I remember she rested
at the dance on my
arm, as a bird
on its nest lest
the eggs break, lest
she lean too heavily
on our love. Snow
melts, feathers
are blown away;
I have let
her ashes down
in me like an anchor.
R.S. THOMAS (1913-2000)
Remember
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-94)
The Five Stages of Grief
The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief.
Go that way, they said,
it’s easy, like learning to climb
stairs after the amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two. I passed you the toast –
you sat there. I passed
you the paper – you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed more familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining. What could I exchange
for you? The silence
after storms? My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string. In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
an
d bottles of sleep. I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in defective neon.
Hope was my uncle’s middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing,
though my feet slip
on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards; Acceptance
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance,
its name is in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting.
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I’ve ever known
or dreamed of. Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance. I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase,
I have lost you.
LINDA PASTAN (b. 1932)
The Widower
For a season there must be pain –
For a little, little space
I shall lose the sight of her face,
Take back the old life again
While She is at rest in her place.
For a season this pain must endure,
For a little, little while
I shall sigh more often than smile
Till Time shall work me a cure,
And the pitiful days beguile.
For that season we must be apart,
For a little length of years,