Poems for Funerals

The elegy--the traditional poem for mourning--began in ancient Greece as a sad song lamenting love and death, often accompanied by a flute and written in a specific meter. The form, however, moved away from its fixed metrical roots when it was adopted by Renaissance poets such as Ben Jonson, lexander !ope, and John "onne. These writers made a distinction between a proper elegy--which expresses sorrow and a search for consolation--and #elegiac# poetry that meditates on loss, grief, death, and mortality in a variety of verse forms, such as the ode, epitaph, and eulogy. $or example, "onne famously confronted death when he wrote the elegiac%
Death, be not proud though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so, For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow, Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

&ha'espeare, of course, wrote a great deal about #what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil,# and at about the same time John (ilton wrote his famous #)ycidas,# which appeared in a collection of elegies commemorating the death of a *ambridge collegemate. +illiam +ordsworth wrote poems in the elegiac mode, as did )ord lfred Tennyson, +alt +hitman, +illiam Butler ,eats, and Thomas -ardy in the nineteenth century. The form was adopted and transformed again in the twentieth century by poets such as +. -. uden, "ylan Thomas, +allace &tevens, Robert )owell, and llen Ginsberg, who wrote the famous elegy for his mother #.addish,# which begins%
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while walk on the sunny pavement of !reenwich "illage. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and 've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the #addish aloud, listening to $ay %harles blues shout blind on the phonograph the rhythm the rhythm&&and your memory in my head three years after&& 'nd read 'donais' last triumphant stan(as aloud&&wept, reali(ing how we suffer&& 'nd how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the )ebrew 'nthem, or the *uddhist *ook of 'n& swers&&and my own imagination of a withered leaf&&at dawn&& Dreaming back thru life, +our time&&and mine accelerating toward 'poca& lypse

&ome famous, and powerful, elegiac poems are% #$uneral Blues# by +. -. uden #To the "ead# by $ran' Bidart #$ugue of "eath# by !aul *elan #Because / *ould 0ot &top $or "eath# by 1mily "ic'inson #"ying way# by +illiam (eredith #To an thlete "ying ,oung# by . 1. -ousman #"eath &tands bove (e# by +alter &avage )andor #The Reaper and the $lowers# by -enry +adsworth )ongfellow #$or the 2nion "ead# by Robert )owell #"irge +ithout (usic# by 1dna &t. 3incent (illay #1legy for Jane# by Theodore Roeth'e

#0ovember# by 1dmund &penser #4uestion# by (ay &wenson #/n (emoriam# by )ord lfred Tennyson # Refusal to (ourn the "eath, by $ire, of a *hild in )ondon# by "ylan Thomas #5 *aptain6 (y *aptain6# by +alt +hitman $inally, a great resource is the anthology Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, edited by &andra (. Gilbert and published by +. +. 0orton. - &ee more at% https%77www.poets.org7viewmedia.php7prm(/"78989:sthash.-04a";ii.dpuf