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  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

  Bashō 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

  Czeslaw Milosz On Parting with My Wife, Janina

  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)

  Never so much absence,

  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,