(WT#2) Two Poems About Death (Day 4)

I've never experienced a traumatic death, nor am I very sombre by nature, but in literature, for me, nothing makes more impact than a poem about The End.

Sometimes it's depressing, sometimes it's beautiful, sometimes it's both.



A poem by Ted Berrigan.

The heart stops briefly when someone dies,
A quick pain as you hear the news and someone passes
From your outside life to inside. Slowly the heart adjusts
To its new weight and slowly everything continues, sanely.


And a poem by Paul McCartney about his childhood friend Ivan Vaughan -- who introduced him to John Lennon.

Two doors open
On the eighteenth of June
Two Babies born
On the same day
In Liverpool
One was Ivan
The other - me
We met in adolescence
And did the deeds
They dared us do
Jive with Ive
The ace on the bass
He introduced to me
At Woolton fete
A pal or two
And so we did
A classic scholar he
A rocking roller me
As firm as friends could be
Cranlock naval
Cranlock pie
A tear is rolling
Down my eye
On the sixteenth of August
Nineteen ninety-three
One door closed

Bye-bye Ivy

 

i like both of those. here is one by Percy Shelley...

On Death

The pale, the cold, and the moony smile
Which the meteor beam of a starless night
Sheds on a lonely and sea-girt isle,
Ere the dawning of morn's undoubted light,
Is the flame of life so fickle and wan
That flits round our steps till their strength is gone.

O man! hold thee on in courage of soul
Through the stormy shades of thy wordly way,
And the billows of clouds that around thee roll
Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day,
Where hell and heaven shall leave thee free
To the universe of destiny.

This world is the nurse of all we know,
This world is the mother of all we feel,
And the coming of death is a fearful blow
To a brain unencompass'd by nerves of steel:
When all that we know, or feel, or see,
Shall pass like an unreal mystery.

The secret things of the grave are there,
Where all but this frame must surely be,
Though the fine-wrought eye and the wondrous ear
No longer will live, to hear or to see
All that is great and all that is strange
In the boundless realm of unending change.

Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death?
Who lifteth the veil of what is to come?
Who painteth the shadows that are beneath
The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?
Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be
With the fears and the love for that which we see?

Percy Bysshe Shelley