death
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A death is one of the events that prompts those for whom poetry is only an occasional habit to reach for a poem. This may be especially the case if the person has to speak at a funeral. Here’s a poem by James Fenton (1949–) that s good for a funeral and tries to answer…
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Tithonus was the son of Laomedon, the king of Troy, and the lover of Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Eos asked Zeus to give Tithonus eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tennyson wrote his poem Tithonus a month or two after the unexpected and sudden death of his 22-year-old friend Arthur Henry Hallam.…
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This is the third poem I’ve posted by Wendell Berry (1934–), an American poet whom I discovered only this year. I love the directness and earthiness of his poetry. As well as being a poet he is a farmer and an environmental campaigner. He entered my life again when a doctor from Hawaii sent me…
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These three poems on death by three of the greatest poets in English—William Shakespeare (1564-1616), W B Yeats (1865-1939), and T S Eliot (1888-1965)—are all very familiar to me—and probably to you. If you are reading even one of them for the first time you are in for a treat. I came across the three…
A Cairn of Poems 