Death Poems

Shakespeare

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Emily Dickinson The Chariot

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

Full Poem

Andrew Marvel To His Coy Mistress

At my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity
The graves a fine and private place
But none I think, do there embrace

On My First Son, by Ben Jonson

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy,
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I loose all father, now. For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon scap'd world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetrie.
For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.

Jonson's son died of the plague in 1603. He tries to rise above egoistical grief and regard his son as a debt paid back to God, to be envied for having escaped from this world. Yet, he cannot let go of being a father, as the very writing of this verse proves. The boy's name was Benjamin, which in Hebrew means 'son of the right hand'. There's a similar foreign-language pun in the 10th line, where 'poetrie' (they are Jonson's itallics) wants us to recall the Greek origin of the word, which means 'making'.

Felix Dennis On News of a Friend's Sudden Death

How thin the cloth, how fine the thread
That cloaks the living from the dead
How narrowly from breath to breath
We plait our rendezvous with death.

How swift the tenant flees the gate;
The landlord's writ, come soon or late
Foreclosing slum or stately hall,
Hard bailiffs at His beck and call.

How feather light the feeble spark
That shields us from the greedy dark
Unjessed our souls like falcons fly!
How weak the lure, how wide the sky!

Felix Dennis I Plucked All The Cherries

I plucked all the cherries
Chance would allow
Take them and welcome -
I'm done with them now.

Done with the ladder
And done with the trees,
Take them and welcome,
They're no use to mel.

Done with the getting of
What I could get,
Take it and welcome -
And try not to forget

Tp pluck all the cherries
Chance will allow
Take them and welcome -
I'm done with them now.

Felix Dennis I Am Fleeing For My Life

I am emptying the wine from Life's decanter -
While musing, 'Do I dare?" each glass I pour
I have grown too fond of gallows-haunted banter,
Nor am I quite as knowing as before.

For the laughter of the gods grows ever louder
And I mark the rents, through which their weary eyes
Peer down upon this world of paint and powder
Where nothing is as kind as it was wise.