This Kindle book (The Companion Guide to Death) is now available on Amazon by clicking here...and it is only $1.99
See my blog listing for this here.
See my blog listing for this here.
A Funeral passed me in the street to-day—
A dolorous procession moving slow
With all the grim respectable display
Which makes a hideous mockery of woe.
Ah, but 'twas brave! A spectacle so fine
Might almost tempt an humble wight to die,
For once in proud pre-eminence to shine
Chief actor in a grisly tragedy.
In truth I turned away in sick disgust
With all the proud parade of plume and pall,
And some small pity for the senseless dust
Consigned to earth with ghastly festival.
The savage past still clings to us, we deem
It sacred duty to display our woe
In ostentatious mummery, and dream
The dead are honored by the dreadful show.
The grave is very humble, and the pride
That fools us here the dead have all forgot;
The king and slave lie calmly side by side,
Each well contented with his lowly lot
Impartial earth receives into her breast
The varied brood she bears, the great and small,
High-thoughted man and stolid brute, the best
And worst unfavored, for she loves them all.
But man, too conscious of himself, resents
The pure democracy of Nature's plan,
And rears above his bones brief monuments
To bear the empty tale: Here lies a Man!
Years wear serenely on, another age
Treads laughing on the sorrows of the last,
Time wears the letters from the granite page,
And weeds grow on the memories of the past
And rightly viewed, it is a gracious doom;
The dead and their traditions pass away
To give new life, new thought, new beauty room,
A higher law of being to obey.
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