Poetry for a Funeral

March 29, 2004 2:10 AM

Funerals - I've been asked to read at a relatives funeral (my grandfather who was very old, and quite sick)...and I've spent most of this weekend reading poetry books and searching online for suitable things to read. Now I turn to the well read people at MeFi - I'm looking for two things, one to commemorate a long life... and one to celebrate the fact that he may be meeting up with his wife again...

What are your recommendations for poetry resources? Or even specific poems you have read/heard for these occasions?

(I'm no writer - so I'm nervous about attempting something myself - apart from an introduction which will be simple and brief.)
posted by mattr to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

Mattr: My sincere condolences.

I wish everybody took these duties so seriously. Here are two suggestions, both from one of my favourite poets, Christina Rossetti:

Remember:

"Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad."

Rest:

"O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth;
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies,
Hush'd in and curtain'd with a bless'd dearth
Of all that irk'd her from the hour of birth;
With stillness that is almost Paradise.
Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her,
Silence more musical than any song;
Even her very heart has ceased to stir:
Until the morning of Eternity
Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be;
And when she wakes she will not think it long."

This last one (which hints at the reunion you mentioned) may require changing the gender but I'm sure she would have approved, as it's such a simple matter:

"O Earth, lie heavily upon his eyes;
Seal his sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth;
Lie close around him; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
He hath no questions, he hath no replies,
Hush'd in and curtain'd with a bless'd dearth
Of all that irk'd him from the hour of birth;
With stillness that is almost Paradise.
Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth him,
Silence more musical than any song;
Even his very heart has ceased to stir:
Until the morning of Eternity
His rest shall not begin nor end, but be;
And when he wakes he will not think it long."

They're both very sentimental and dramatic and will probably make some people cry - I don't know whether this would be appropriate but where I live this is cathartic and fitting.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 2:39 AM on March 29, 2004

You might try looking up different sources of old folk songs; some number of them deal with stuff like this. Especially if you or someone else can sing.

One of my favorites is a somewhat-modified version of "The True Lover's Farewell" that appears on Custer LaRue's album of the same name. The standard version is more-or-less about a sailor pledging his love, but this version is trimmed a bit and modified so it's to her dead husband instead:

Fare you well my own true love,
Oh fare you well for a while,
I'm going away but I'll come again
If I go ten thousand mile

The crow that is so black my love
Shall surely turn to white
And if ever I grow false to the one I love
Bright day shall turn to night

Bright day shall turn to night my love
And the rocks shall melt in the sun
And the fire shall freeze and be no more
And the raging sea shall burn

Oh don't you see the little turtledove
A-skipping from vine to vine
A-making a mourn for the loss of his love
Just as I do for mine

Fare you well my own true love,
Oh fare you well for a while,
I'm going away but I'll come again
If I go ten thousand mile

I can send you a bigly-compressed mp3 if you want
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:08 AM on March 29, 2004

http://www.plagiarist.com/ has 9162 poems by 457 authors. Just click 'Poems'.
posted by internook at 6:11 AM on March 29, 2004

In addition to the previous excellent suggestions in this thread, there is a book for this sort of occasion listed over at amazon.com -- if you look through it's table of contents (keep scrolling down and clicking "next page") there you may get some more ideas.

I have always liked Mark Strand's "The End"

"Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he's held by the sea's roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he'll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he'll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end."

This Robert Louis Stevenson poem also occurred to me -- Stevenson had the last 2 lines of this engraved on his tomb as his epitaph -- the "home" references may get at the reunion idea you mention:

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

And, I'm sorry for your loss, mattr. Best wishes at the funeral.
posted by onlyconnect at 9:59 AM on March 29, 2004 [2 favorites]

Also, the end of ee cummings' poem about the death of his father is very moving; parts of the poem could also be appropriate for a grandfather, though the whole thing is less relevant to the themes you mention above. my father moved through dooms of love
posted by onlyconnect at 10:08 AM on March 29, 2004

uh.... the Bible?
posted by keswick at 2:50 PM on March 29, 2004