Elegy Poems
Dirge Without Music
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
......
September Song
by Geoffrey Hill
born 19.6.32 - deported 24.9.42
Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
you were not. Not forgotten
or passed over at the proper time.
As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to that end.
Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.
......
Duino Elegies: The First Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying.
And so I force myself, swallow and hold back
the surging call of my dark sobbing.
......
Adonais
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I weep for Adonais -he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"
......
Elegy In A Country Churchyard
by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.
But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.
......
Mama's Son
by Graham Ereks
'I'll be back soonest', he said to mama blithely,
Nescient of the state's cannibalistic hostility.
How can mama take this inhumanity likely?
Tear-drops every day, thanks to brutality.
Bloodthirsty men-in-black, liveried omnipresent
Ambassadors of anarchy, never at all decent.
Haranguers of licitness, promoters of inequity,
Vampires they are,for they are an insignia of nonentity.
......
A Drunkard's Tears
by Graham Ereks
Half-clad I pittled in the grown-old day,
Body boozed by a gazillion boozes.
I sauntered hither and thither zigzag
My destination I knew not, for my vision
Had been boozed and boozed.
I sauntered scalarly gibbering to my booze;
Oh what a feeling it was!
I came by a canis manacled and together we
Confabulated heart-to-heart.
......
The Fern
by Rosa Jamali
The Fern
A Poem by Rosa Jamali
Translated from original Persian to English by the Author
I was a seven-story being, covered in scarce species of a plant
And it was a funeral ceremony
and I was the only single mourner
First I grabbed a gemstone from this very soil,
And then sealed and knocked it over my forehead
I returned and had a glance at my homeland again and I wept.
......
The Entombment
by Graham Ereks
A woman of virtue
Is no more;
A woman loved by all.
A wife and, doubtless,
A great mother.
Surreptitiously death’s taken
Her away from us.
Your living body I reminisce,
Not your cadaver.
......
O Captain! My Captain!
by Walt Whitman
O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills; 10
......
