I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain;
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-94)
Turn Again to Life
If I should die and leave you here a while,
Be not like others, sore undone, who keep
Long vigils by the silent dust, and weep.
For my sake – turn again to life and smile,
Nerving thy heart and trembling hand to do
Something to comfort other hearts than thine.
Complete those unfinished tasks of mine
And I, perchance, may therein comfort you.
MARY LEE HALL
For Katrina’s Sun Dial
Time is too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice,
But for those who love, time is
Eternity.
HENRY VAN DYKE (1852-1933)
‘Thinking I enjoyed the pleasures of life’
Thinking I enjoyed the pleasures of life
I myself was enjoyed by life.
Thinking I didn’t need to burn off my sins,
I myself was burnt up.
Thinking that I passed the time,
I myself was passing on.
Greed didn’t grow old & leave my body,
I myself grew old.
BHARTRHARI (7th century)
translated from the Sanskrit by John Cort
Demiurge
They say that reality exists only in the spirit
that corporal existence is a kind of death
that pure being is bodiless
that the idea of the form precedes the form substantial.
But what nonsense it is!
as if any Mind could have imagined a lobster
dozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!
Even the mind of God can only imagine
those things that have become themselves:
bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation
even if it is only a lobster on tiptoe.
Religion knows better than philosophy.
Religion knows that Jesus was never Jesus
till he was born from a womb, and ate soup and bread
and grew up, and became, in the wonder of creation, Jesus,
with a body and with needs, and a lovely spirit.
D.H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930)
In the End Is the Body
In the end is the body – what we know
as inspiration departs before
the final assault of pain and decay.
Even the carpenter’s son from Nazareth
could not, in the end, overcome
the body’s claims though he knew
inspiration more than most.
And don’t imagine his mother
was indifferent to the hammer smashing
the arrangement of bone and sinew she
had held in hers at his beginning.
She wished him back unpierced, smelling
of sawdust and sweat. He was the one
she’d hoped would close her eyes in the end.
In the end my mother lay
body-bound, curled like a foetus,
fretting for a peppermint, a sip of whiskey,
the pillow turned this way and that,
and she a woman who, buoyant in silk
and shingled hair, stood on the hill
at Fiesole reciting her Browning to the wind.
GAIL HOLST-WARHAFT (b. 1941)
Sonnet LXXXIX
(FROM 100 Love Sonnets)
When I die, I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me once more:
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.
I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you
to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.
I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I love and sang above everything else
to continue to nourish, full-flowered:
so that you can reach everything my love directs you to,
so that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.
PABLO NERUDA (1904-73)
translated from the Spanish by Stephen Tapscott
Haiku
When I go,
guard my tomb well,
grasshopper.
ISSA (1763-1827)
translated from the Japanese
by Lucien Stryk & Takashi Ikemoto
The Soul Driven from the Body
The soul driven from the body
Mourns the memory it leaves behind.
A dove hit in flight sadly turns
Its neck and sees its nest destroyed.
ABU AL-ALA AL-MA‘ARRI (973-1057/8)
translated from the Arabic by
Abdullah al-Udhari & George Wightman
‘I’m the one who has the body’
I’m the one who has the body,
you’re the one who holds the breath.
You know the secret of my body,
I know the secret of your breath.
That’s why your body
is in mine.
You know
and I know, Rāmanātha,
the miracle
of your breath
in my body.
DEVARA DASIMAYYA (10th century Indian)
translated from the Kannada by A.K. Ramanujan
The Paradox
Our death implicit in our birth,
We cease, or cannot be;
And know when we are laid in earth
We perish utterly.
And equally the spirit knows
The indomitable sense
Of immortality, which goes
Against all evidence.
See faith alone, whose hand unlocks
All mystery at a touch,
Embrace the awful Paradox
Nor wonder overmuch.
RUTH PITTER (1897-1992)
‘Everything you see’
Everything you see has its roots in the unseen world.
The forms may change, yet the essence remains the same.
Every wonderful sight will vanish, every sweet word will fade,
But do not be disheartened,
The source they come from is eternal, growing,
Branching out, giving new life and new joy.
Why do you weep?
The source is within you
And this whole world is springing up from it.
RUMI (1207-73)
translated from the Persian by Andrew Harvey
4
The Dying of the Light
PAIN & RESOLUTION
The world today hangs on a single thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.
JUNG
Since nature’s works be good, and death doth serve As nature’s work, why should we fear to die? Since fear is vain, but when it may preserve, Why should we fear that which we cannot fly?
PHILIP SIDNEY
For many of us, religious rituals are no longer adequate to the complexities of mourning for the dead…In the power and intricacy of the modern elegy, we can discover some of the twentieth century’s most sophisticated thinking about grief, some of its most impassioned articulations of it…We need elegies that, while imbued with grief, can hold up to the acid suspicions of our moment.
JAHAN RAMAZANI
MANY MODERN POETS write as agnostics or unbelieve
rs, and in trying to make sense of death they are confronting not only loss but fear of extinction. This section has several contemporary poems which doubters and sceptics may find helpful, especially those amongst us who aren’t sure what we believe, whose grief over loss is the more intense for not knowing what happens to the soul after death. Such poems offer not solace or comfort but honest engagement with fears we all share. In his extended elegy ‘Le Petit Salvié’ (53-56), American poet C.K. Williams wrestles with the meaning of death, helping us make sense of no sense, mirroring our own anxieties and contradictions (too long to read in full, the two extracts here offer scope for further selection). Seamus Heaney called Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ (52) ‘the definitive post-Christian English poem, one that abolishes the soul’s traditional pretension to immortality’. Other poets would assert that absence of life after death is as questionable as its presence. But however various and contradictory these poems, their message chimes with Larkin’s famous words (in ‘An Arundel Tomb’), proving ‘Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.’
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
DYLAN THOMAS (1914-53)
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
W.E. HENLEY (1849-1903)
Et in Arcadia
Living is here
And now. I
Look forward, see
Today tomorrow
A yesterday
Of what was I
When we were.
All is recalling: how
Our vision of what’s gone
Changes with each new Now
As we change with what’s done
And our perspectives change.
Life, they say, must go on
To alter all, to alter
In recollection
That shadow of her shadow,
All of her that I am.
The sun on a polluted river,
May morning by a flowing Thames,
A lace of trees, their leaves beginning,
And we two strangers holding hands
Beside a theatre yet a-building,
By broken bricks and iron bones
Of weathered bomb-sites weeding over
In sunlight that’s presaging summer,
A summer that has come, and gone.
Et in Arcadia
Ego. As evening
Leads her shadow on
And, diamond, a star
Increases with the wane
Of light to promise a
Different beginning,
I am to thank whatever for
The fortune of day.
I am changing: she does not.
How can I change and she not change?
Those words, Till death do us part,
Too late I understand.
I see things in a different dark,
All things that nothing can explain.
DAVID WRIGHT (1920-94)
On Parting with My Wife, Janina
Women mourners were giving their sister to fire.
And fire, the same as we looked at together,
She and I, in marriage through long years,
Bound by an oath for good or ill, fire
In fireplaces in winter, campfires, fires of burning cities,
Elemental, pure, from the beginnings of the Earth,
Was taking away her streaming hair, gray,
Seized her lips and her neck, engulfed her, fire
I thought nothing of languages. Or of words of prayer.
I loved her, without knowing who she really was.
I inflicted pain on her, chasing my illusion.
I betrayed her with women, though faithful to her only.
We lived through much happiness and unhappiness,
Separations, miraculous rescues. And now, this ash.
And the sea battering the shore when I walk the empty boulevard.
And the sea battering the shore. And ordinary sorrow.
How to resist nothingness? What power
Preserves what once was, if memory does not last?
For I remember little. I remember so very little.
Indeed, moments restored would mean the Last Judgment
That is adjourned from day to day, by Mercy perhaps.
Fire, liberation from gravity. An apple does not fall,
A mountain moves from its place. Beyond the fire-curtain,
A lamb stands in the meadow of indestructible forms.
The souls in Purgatory burn. Heraclitus, crazy,
Sees the flame consuming the foundations of the world.
Do I believe in the Resurrection of the Flesh? Not of this ash.
I call, I beseech: elements, dissolve yourselves!
Rise into the other, let it come, kingdom!
Beyond the earthly fire compose yourselves anew!
CZESLAW MILOSZ (b. 1911)
translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz & Robert Hass
from When You Died
1
When you died
I went through the rain
carrying my nightmare
to register the death.
A well-groomed healthy gentleman
safe within his office
said – Are you the widow?
Couldn’t he have said
Were you his wife?
2
After the first shock
I found I was
solidly set in my flesh.
I was an upright central pillar,
the soft flesh melted round me.
My eyes melted
spilling the inexhaustible essence of sorrow.
The soft flesh of the body
melted onto chairs and into beds
dragging its emptiness and pain.
I lodged inside holding myself upright,
warding off the dreadful deliquescence.
3
November.
Stooping under muslins
of grey rain I fingered
through ribbons of wet grass,
traced stiff stems down to the wormy earth
and one by one snapped o
ff
the pale surviving flowers; they would ride
with him, lie on the polished plank
above his breast.
People said – Why do you not
follow the coffin?
Why do you not
have any funeral words spoken?
Why not
send flowers from a shop?
[…]
5
When you died
I did not for the moment
think about myself;
I grieved deeply and purely for your loss,
that you had lost your life.
I grieved bitterly for your mind destroyed,
your courage thrown away,
your senses aborted under the amazing skin
no one would ever touch again.
I grieve still
that we’d have grown
even more deeply close and old together
and now shall not.
PAMELA GILLILAN (1918-2001)