Graveyard poems for the exam

Along the fields as we came by

A.E. Housman - The speaker tells about a time a year ago when he walked past "the aspen over stile and stone" with his love, and the aspen spoke to him telling him that "time" would put their love "to bed" which is now true a year later. As the man walks past the same "aspen" now, he wonders if the aspen is speaking to his new love telling her that the same story the "aspen" told him a year ago. -> What do we owe the dead? Should we find a new love if possible if our current one dies? - Ironic

Stone, steel, dominions pass

A.E. Housman A reflection on love, especially love in death. The speaker is dead, and reflects on everything that now passes him by (like "stone", "steel" and "dominions" or "faith"). The speaker understands that death severs promises ("faith") made during life. - What do we owe the dead? -> Really, what do the dead owe us? Death breaks allegiances made by lovers, so if the living lover is unfaithful it doesn't matter because the dead lover already has been. "All knots that lovers tie / Are tied to sever; / Here shall your sweet-heart lie, Untrue for ever." Reminiscent of Ah, are you digging of my grave OR Is my team ploughing, OR by her aunt's grave OR along the field as we came by - Cynical - Faith, love and all human creations are transient, but death is forever -> Like Lament or Ozymandias

Easter Hymn

A.E. Housman Speaker questions Christianity by offering two choices to the dead person, dependent on the afterlife that the person is in. The speaker uses a didactic tone (in 2nd person) to urge the dead person in the Christian afterlife to "bow hither out of heaven and see and save." On the other hand, if the dead person merely "sleep(s)" they should "sleep well." -> What do the dead owe us? "...if the grave rent and the stone rolled by, / A the right hand of majesty on high / You sit, and sitting so remember yet / Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat, / Your cross and passion and the life you gave, / Bow hither out of heaven and see and save."

Is My Team Ploughing

A.E. Housman The speaker is dead, and speaks to his best friend about the life he left behind. The speaker asks about his "ploughing" horses, "football" team, "girl" and "friend," expecting all four subjects to be changed without him. His best friend assures him that nothing has changed without his presence, and actually he has found new love with the dead man's wife. "No change though you lie under / The land you used to plough" "Ay, the ball is flying, / The lads play heart and soul" "Your girl is well contented." "Yes, lad, I lie easy, / I lie as lads would choose;/" - What do we owe the dead? Like Ah, are you digging on my grave? Self-interest prevails and memory fails. Can you betray the dead? (like By Her Aunt's Grave). -> Like Ah, are you digging on my grave? because the living person is given the last word (the dead man's best friend in this case)

To An Athlete Dying Young

A.E. Housman The speaker muses about an athlete who has died young, who he admires (labelling the athlete a "smart lad") because the athlete will not live to see his record beaten (will stay famous - immortalized in his prime). The speaker begins the poem with an image of burial that resembles the day the athlete won his "town the race" (both times the athlete is being carried home) - perhaps, equivocating them - both are to be praised. "Smart lad, to slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay" "Eyes the shady night has shut / Cannot see the record cut," "Now you will not swell the rout / Of lads that wore their honors out," "And hold to the low lintel up / The still defended challenge-cup" "Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, / And find unwithered on its curls" - How we fetishize youth. - How we project our desires upon the dead. Create an imagined future for the dead. Like Lament or In Nunhead Cemetery. -> Poem resembles a Greek myth. Fantasy involved in how we remember/think about the dead; unrealistic. - What does it mean to be remembered? Or, forgotten?

With rue my heart is laden

A.E. Housman The speaker sympathizes with "golden friends," "rose-lipt maiden(s)" and "lightfoot lad(s)" who are now dead ("laid" and "sleeping"). -> Like "To an Athlete Dying Young." Youth (and the beauty and activity associated with it) fades. Pitiful.

Easter Morning

A.R. Ammons The speaker describes how he frequently returns to the grave of his younger brother who died as a child. His brother's death, led to a death of his own life ("I have a life that did not become, /") Speaker searches for something, and finds two circling eagles, to break him from this cycle of despair and regret From despair to glory -> story of Easter morning in the Bible - He (Jesus) has risen. Must return to the place of despair (the grave), to increase vulnerability to reach renewal. Trace patterns to create new ones. "...it was a sight of bountiful / majesty and integrity: the having / patterns and routes, breaking / from them toe explore other patterns or / better ways to routes, and then the / return: a dance sacred as the sap in / the trees..." - What do we owe the dead? -> Grief? To "have a life that did not become"? - What does the grave symbolize? What can it do for us? -> "it is to his grave I most / frequently return and return / to ask what is wrong, what was wrong....but the grave will not heal & and the child, / stirring, must share my grave / with me," -> "teachers, just about everybody older / (and some younger) collected in one place / waiting, particularly, but not for / me, ...all in the graveyard / assembled," ->"...I cannot leave this place, for / for me it is the dearest and the worst, / it is life nearest ti life which is / life lost:"

In Memoriam A.H.H. (Arthur Henry Hallam)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Inspiration of this collection of poems was the death of Tennyson's best friend and brother in law, who died suddenly. Completed over 17 years (= shows stages of grief) II: A poet's homage to a Yew-Tree in a graveyard, which the poet imagines becoming a part of at the end of the poem. - Time and nature prevails, but human life is short. "And in the dusk of the, the clock / Beats out the little lives of men." - Death brings the human to re-incorporate with nature "I seem to fail from out my blood / And grow incorporate into thee." - A wish to be like nature -> hardy and unchangeable (and immortal?) "And gazing on thee, sullen tree, / Sick for thy stubborn hardihood." IV - The speaker describes sleeping and talking to his heart. When the speaker sleeps, his "powers" are given "away" and so his heart is burdened with loss, but when the speaker wakes his will regains control of his heart again ("With morning wakes the will, and cries, / Thou shalt not be the fool of loss"). - Sleep is an imitation of death V - The speaker muses on the utility of words, especially in times of grieving. The speaker thinks that "measured language" is useful for the "unique heart and brain," as a "dull narcotic," but imperfect in describing the experience of the writer (only gives an "outline" because "words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within.") VI - The speaker begins the poem by condemning the words usually said in the face of grief. -> "One writes, that 'Other friends remain,' / That 'Loss if common to the race', —/ That loss is common would not make / My own less bitter, rather more: / Then, the speaker describes a few ironic scenarios in which a lover is thinking of their loved one and preparing for their return home at the same moment the loved one dies (as Tennyson was doing — writing a letter to Hallam — when Hallam died). Ex. "O mother, praying God will save / Thy sailor, — while thy head is bow'd, / His heavy-shooter hammock-shroud / Drops in his vast and wandering grave." VII Speaker describes returning to his dead friend's house, hoping to encounter his friend there. His friend's house is a place where memories of the two's past life together return. - House symbolizes the grave -> place where the body was. House as a memorial (like Woodpile?) XIV - Speaker tells a story that shows that he wouldn't be surprised if his dead friend wasn't actually dead. Through this story, the speaker shows that denial is a stage of grief. "If one should bring me this report, / That thou hadst touch'd the land to-day....And I perceived no touch of change, / No hint of death in all his frame, / But found him all in all the same, / I should not feel it to be strange." XXI - Speaker muses on the nature and function of grief. For the speaker, grief is an instinct ("I do but sing because I must") so it shouldn't be judged. -> a "private" song - what about the "chairs and thrones of civil power" (aren't more important things happening) -> a public "parade of pain" (vain??) - Encounter with nature to reach loved one -> The speaker uses the "grasses of the grave" of his loved one to sing and play a song. XLVIII - Speaker reflects on expressions of sorrow ("these brief lays"). The speaker proposes that individual poems/songs are inadequate expressions of sorrow, but that sometimes they're all we have. "Nor dare she trust a larger lay, / But rather loosens from the lip / Short swallow-flights of song, that dip / Their wings in tears, and skin away." L A didactic poem, where the poet instructs his audience to "Be near me" when he is dying ("when my light is low," "when the sensuous frame / Is rack'd with pangs,* "when my faith is dry," "when I fade away") LIV The poet hopes that all life (and suffering) has a purpose, but knows that all he has is hope, faith and trust in the idea that the world has an order because "we know not anything." "Oh yet we trust that somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill..." "That nothing walks with aimless feet; / That not one life shall be destroy'd / Or cast as rubbish to the void..." "Behold, we know not anything; ...../ So runs my dream: but what am I? / An infant crying in the night: / An infant crying for the light: / And with no language but a cry."

The Grass

Carl Sandberg - The speaker is personified grass ("the grass" - interesting that "the grass" isn't capitalized), whose goal is to convert dead bodies into grass. "I am the grass. / Let me work." - Grass is given a commanding, mechanical tone. Compare to Leaves of Grass -> where the grass is transformative and sympathetic. -> "Pile the bodies high" -> "Shovel them under" - Universality and immortality of nature (the grass). Nature vs humans. Grass erases identity of dead (compare to Leaves of Grass).

Jesuit Graves

Charles Wright The speaker reflects on the grave of the poet, Gerald Manley Hopkins, in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, which is a mass grave ("The Jesuit pit." - with "three desperate mounds in the small, square enclosure,"). Poem is a protest against mass graves, particularly this mass grave, which the speaker believes is not a testament to Hopkins' creative and imaginative life as a poet. - What relation does the grave have to the body? "Above the gravel and grassless dirt. / Just dirt and the small stones - / how strict, how self-effacing. / Not suited for you, however, Father Bird-of-Paradise, / Whose plumage of far wonder is not formless and not faceless," OR "Whatever rises comes together, they say. They say." Like Churchill's Grave - Pessimistic, disparaging tone "They say." - Questioning of religious doctrines/proverbs. How does death instruct us in how to live our lives? -> "Whatever rises comes together, they say. They say." -> "Sacrifice is the cause of ruin. The absence of sacrifice is the cause of ruin. Thus the legends instruct us,"

In Nunhead Cemetery

Charlotte Mew - Speaker is standing by his lover's grave as the gravedigger fills in the grave, and reminiscing about how recently his lover was alive and they were doing things together. He thinks about all the things he still wants to do with his lover, like get married which they missed by a month ("By a month we have missed our Day:"). The speaker's grief gives him a pessimistic outlook on life. "There is something horrible about a flower..." "There is something terrible about a child." - Speaker is in denial about lover's death "This not a real place; perhaps by-and-by / I shall wake" - Speaker has a lot of regret "There was nothing we could not do, you said, / And you went, and I let you go."

Annabel Lee

Edgar Allan Poe - Speaker describes "a maiden," Annabel Lee, who he loved and who died (because the angels "went envying her and me") when they were kids in a "kingdom by the sea." - Fairytale like quality -> Maiden -> Kingdom -> Angels -> Annabel Lee died by a "wind (blowing) out of a cloud, chilling" her and her "highborn kinsmen" bearing her away - Speaker mimics the posture of the dead "And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side / Of my darling" - Speaker is given exclusive power of narration. Obsessive and possessive. Paranoid persona. Who actually killed Annabel Lee? Mystical - did the speaker? "The angels, not half so happy in heaven, / Went ending her and me; / Yes! that was the reason..." - Natural imagery -> kingdom by the sea -> wind -> stars -> moon

Renascence

Edna St. Vincent Millay The speaker describes a transition between many different states, ending in an enlightened soul. The speaker begins in a restricted, "bounded" world, where all she can see is "three long mountains and a wood...and...three islands in a bay." The speaker reaches up to touch the top of the sky, and "Infinity" comes down and settles over her. The speaker "behold(s)" Immensity, hears "the gossiping of friendly sphere, the creaking of the tented sky, the ticking of Eternity," and is overwhelmed. The speaker, then, "crav(es) death" as she feels "Infinity press(ing) down upon the finite Me!," which leads the Earth to open until she sinks in the Earth. This leads the speaker to be "gladly dead" and listen to the rain, but then she quickly longs for life again. She wishes for "new birth," and the rain sets her free striking her grave and "washing" her grave "away from" her, "breath(ing)" her "soul" back to her. The speaker praises God, stating "O God...no dark disguise / Can e'er hereafter hide from me / Thy radiant identity!" and realizes that it is in her power to change her outlook on life ("And he whose soul is flat — the sky / Will cave in on him by and by") — she doesn't need a higher power. - The graveyard as an imagined, emotional, psychological state -> death as a metaphor for depression - Connect to The Weed

First Death in Nova Scotia

Elizabeth Bishop Speaker is a child describing the burial of her cousin, Arthur. The child doesn't understand the concept of death — she thinks that Arthur has just been "invited...to be the smallest page at court" because Arthur was "laid out" in the "cold, cold parlor," just like the "chronographs" of Edward, Prince of Wales, Princess Alexandra, King George and Queen Mary. - Childlike tone/diction is striking -> Vitality given to the "stuffed loon" shot by Uncle Arthur. What is dead and what is alive? -> Allusion to Jack Frost (children's fairytale) "Jack Frost had started to paint him / the way he always painted / the Maple Leaf (Forever)." He had just begun on his hair. / a few red strokes, and then / Jack Frost thad dropped the brush / and left him white, forever." -> Colors of red and white associated with the loon, the royal couples and Arthur - Lack of emotion, except for confusion -> Compare to "Mid-Term Break" -> child dealing with a child's death. Focus on external observation (a lot about the loon). "But how could Arthur go, clutching his tiny lily,..."

The Weed

Elizabeth Bishop The speaker describes lying "dead" on " a grave, or bed" next to a "cold heart," when "a slight young weed" pushes "up through the heart," which "prod(s)" the speaker from a "desperate sleep." The weed prompts the "rooted heart" to "split apart" and for a "flood of water" to break from it. The weed is "almost swept away," but remains, leading the speaker to ask the weed "What are you doing there?" and the weed replies "I grow...but to divide your heart again." - The graveyard as an imagined, emotional, psychological state -> death as a metaphor for depression - Connect to Renascence

Because I could not stop for death

Emily Dickinson - The speaker describes a date with personified Death (like Cinderella - carriage, gown, data), where the speaker gets into a carriage with Death and Immortality, and all three pass through the town (or rather death passes her -> "Or rather - He passed Us -"). Death and the speaker stop in front of her tombstone ("We paused before a House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground - / The Roof was scarcely visible - / The Cornice - in the Ground -"), and she then passes "Centuries" there that feel like less than a day ("Since then - 'tis Centuries - and yet / Feels shorter than than the Day/). -> Death stops for the speaker because she "could not stop for" it - Capitalization of many words - The process of dying/death is given a fantastical, romantic, and mystical quality (could be compared to Annabel Lee? in its magical quality)

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers

Emily Dickinson - Untouched dead waiting in their "Alabaster Chambers" for the "Resurrection" -> soundlessly waiting for time to pass and cut off from the rest of life - Unfinished quality to the poem (alternate second stanza) - Capitalization of many words - Death as the great equalizer as times passes "Grand go the Years - in the / Crescent - above them - /...Diadems - drop - and Doges -/ Surrender - /"

The Image in Lava

Felicia Hemans - Stone sculpture of mother & child accidentally created by the eruption of M. Vesuvius which has survived the test of time. - Encounter with an object -> not bodies, instead moulds of bodies - Symbol of human love -> speaker passionately argues that love is immortal and holy, which is why this ancient sculpture was made and still exist "Thou art, whose earthly glow / Hath given these ashes holiness — It must, it must be so!" - Drawing on Madonna and Child - In comparison to Ozmandias -> a sculpture made accidentally that "survives the proud memorials rear'd / By conquerors of mankind." "cast in affection's mould." "Outlives the cities of renown / Wherein the mighty trust!" - Transforming a death -> this death is not futile

Written After Visiting A Tomb

Felicia Hemans - The speaker is a mourner who addresses a butterfly that flies over the tomb of a loved one (poet?). The speaker analogizes the spirit/psyche of her loved one to a butterfly. Seeing the butterfly lightens the speaker's mood. "I stood in the silence of lonely thought...Then didst though pass me in radiance by, / Child of the sunbeam, bright butterfly!" "Thou that dost image the freed soul's birth / and its flight away o'er the mists of earth, /" - The speaker praises the reckless, joyous energy of the butterfly, in comparison to her life weighted by life's bleak realities (and the life of the loved one who died). You vs me. "In thy brief being, no strife of mind, / No boundless passion, is deeply shrined; While I, as I gazed on thy swift flight by, / One hour of my soul seem'd infinity!" "No burden of mortal sufferings."

"Lines Written in Wilford Churchyard, on Recovery from Sickness"

Henry Kirke White The speaker walks around a plot of ground ("Beneath this yew") to describe how he wants to be "sepulchered," and weighs the advantages/disadvantages of places and ways to be buried (preferring the "village ground" to the "city burial-place"). The speaker echoes Gray. - Reference to Gray "Such a one perchance did Gray / Frequent, as with a vagrant muse he wanton'd." - Prefers the poor, "unlettered" labourer working in the village ground to the city "rude sexton" -> like Gray appreciating the poor countryfolk. - To what extent does the grave represent the deceased? -> White cares a lot about where he is buried, but accepts that if his wishes about burial are not respected his "spirit" will still "wing its way to these my native regions, and hover o'er this spot." ... Likes the "village ground" because his grave is "protected from the drunken insolence of wassailers profane, and wanton havoc" and would not be "thrown up again by some rude section, and yield its narrow house another tenant." He says that the dead are respected in the village ground. ... Doesn't want his corpse to be "cemented down with brick and stone," but instead intends to lie "beneath a little hillock, grass overgrown, swath'd down with osiers, just as sleep the cotters."

God's Acre

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - A religious perspective on death. - The speaker uses an extended metaphor about farming/gardening to explain how the "good" dead will be resurrected into "immortal bloom." - The burial-ground is "God's Acre" where people are buried as "seed(s)" for the "human harvests" of the resurrection. - Like Leaves of Grass, this poem shows that death is necessary for life. But for Longfellow this new life is life in the resurrection, while for Whitman life is in other non-human forms on Earth (like in grass). Also Whitman's transformation is for everyone, while Longfellow's is only for the "good."

Dead Man's Dump

Issac Rosenberg The speaker describes the battlefield, which looks like a scene from hell. Graphic imagery of dead people or people dying. - One stanza like Sandberg's The Grass -> "Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth / Fretting for their decay: /...Now she has them at last!" (Personified nature) - Some parts like Anthem for Doomed Youth -> "The air is loud with death, / The dark air spurts with fire" -> "Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth" - Mechanical, inhumane nature of war -> "The wheels lurched over sprawled dead/" -> "So we crashed round the bend, / We heard his weak scream, / We heard his very last sound, / And our wheels grazed his dead face." - Accusatory tone towards the Earth. Speaker has a lack of responsibility. "Earth! have they gone into you! / Somewhere they must have gone, / And flung on your hard back / Who hurled them out? Who hurled?" "Maniac Earth!...Dark Earth! dark Heavens!...What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul / With lightning and thunder from your mined heart, /"

The First Snow Fall

James Russell Lowell The speaker is a father who watches the "first snow-fall" with his daughter. His daughter asks him, "Father, who makes it snow," which triggers him to remember another snow fall when one other daughter was buried. - Young death -> death of a child - Conversation between and adult and child -> Like "The Two April Mornings" - Mirroring/doublings like in "The Two April Mornings" Landscape that triggers a memory -> "Again I looked at the snow-fall, / And thought of the leaden sky / That arched o'er our first great sorrow, / When that mound was taped so high." -> Like the cloud with that "long purple cleft" in the two april mornings Two daughters -> "Then, with eyes that saw not, I kissed her; / And she, kissing back, could not know/ That my kiss was given to her sister, / Folded close under deepening snow." -> Like the "blooming Girl" in the two april mornings - Confessional, lyrical tone (measured language - ABCB) - Nature as transformative and renewing -> Rich description of the landscape "Every pine and fir and hemlock / Wore ermine too dear for an earl, / And the poorest twig on the elm-tree / Was ridged inched deep with pearl." = Wealth, richness of landscape into a figure of patience ("I remembered the gradual patience / That fell from that cloud-like snow, / Flake by flake, healing and hiding / the scar of our deep-plunged woe./). Heavenly from rich God. -> "How the flakes were folding it gently, / As did robins the babes in the wood." (Like "The Babes in the Wood" poem) Nature as keeper - What do it do to a person to have death so close to home?

In Flanders Fields

John McCrae - The speakers are deceased soldiers ("We are the Dead") who instruct their reader to "take up (their) quarrel with the foe" because if the readers don't ("break faith"), the soldiers "shall not sleep, though poppies grow / In Flanders fields." This poem was written early in World War Two, and was used as propaganda to get soldiers to enlist. - What do we owe the dead? The dead in this poem suggest we owe them military service - Voice of a collective -> eminence/importance of the dead as a capitalized noun = "We are the Dead." - Dead still have agency "To you from failing hands we throw / The torch; be yours to hold it high. / If ye break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep," Yet, stasis in Flanders field -> 2nd and 3rd stanzas end with bookended (indented) "In Flanders fields." - Utility of death -> Advocates dying for a cause

The Old Burying-Ground

John Townsend Trowbridge - Poet wanders through the landscape of the "old burying ground" (as compared to the new one in the town) where "A by-gone generation" lies. Lonely. - Lots of natural imagery (& description on nature's activity -> in contrast to death) in neglected space - Poet sympathetically acts out the posture of the dead in the graveyard "Under an aged willow, / The earth my bed, / A mossy mound my pillow, / I lean my head." Imagined memory of dead - Cycle of life - Religious lense "The soul, risen from its embers,"

Bomb Crater Sky

Lam Thi My Da The speaker is a Vietnamese soldier who describes being saved by "a road builder" who "had such love" for the country that she "call(ed) the bombs down on (herself)" that were about to hit the soldier's "unit." The bomb crater (where the road builder died) becomes a memorial to the girl ("Now you lie down deep in the earth / As the sky lay down in that earthen crater -> crater and girl's grave are equated) And, the speaker reflects on the girl's incorporation into nature. - Nature and renewal -> nature transforms the road builder's body in the soldier's/speaker's imagination -> "At night your soul sheds light / Like the dazzling stars / Did your soft white skin / Become a bank of white clouds?" -> "By day I pass under a sun-flooded sky / And it is your sky / And that anxious, wakeful disc / Is it the sun, or is it your heart / Lighting my way / As I walk down the long road?" Like "Do not stand at my grave and weep" or "Leaves of Grass" - What do we owe the dead? -> To remember them. Be thankful for what they've given us - in this example the girl has given her life for this soldier. - Death and patriotism - dying for one's country Like In Flanders Fields "They say that you, a road builder / Had such love for our country" "Our country is kind / Water from the sky washes pain away"

The Graves in Rome

Larry Levis The speaker describes visiting Rome with two of his "oldest friends" and coming upon John Keats' grave in Rome (in the Protestant Cemetery linked with Joseph Severn's). The speaker relates how Keats intended his grave to only say "Here lies one whose names is writ in water," instead of his name (because he felt like he hadn't manifested his potential in his life), but his name was put on Joseph Severn's grave. The speaker also describes a "child's smeared (f)fingerprints on a banister" in Naples, which were "indifferently preserved" by "a patina of varnish applied." - What do we leave behind? What is the significance of a name? -> Like "Ozymandias" and "Image in Lava" -> what remains? and, is it accidental or intentional? From the poem..."Cut simply in stone by hand & meant to last / Because of the way a name, any name, Is empty. And not empty. And almost enough." - Conversation between the imagined and the preserved -> Fingerprints on the banister at the hotel in Naples and the story of the child, possibly dying from malaria in Calabria. - Thinking about death prompts us to reflect on life. How all thing come to and end. "I thought, then, that the three of us would be / Indissoluble at the end, & also that / We would all die, of course. And not die." (After walking around the Protestant Cemetery in Rome)

The First Grave

Leticia Landon - First, single grave in the graveyard without a gravestone. - Poet pities the single, lonely grave. Hopes that person is not lonely in death because his grave is certainly lonely. Although, he/she does have the presence of God. - Ends didactically -> we should take care of graves because they are a living symbol of the dead "How many a bitter word 'twould hush — How many a pang 'twould save, / If life more precious held those ties / Which sanctify the grave!"

The Unknown Poet's Grave

Letitia Landon - Hymn to poetic fame and the forgotten grave. Tone of sympathy. - Much value placed on fame. The goal of life is recognition. Life is a wasted one if it is not remembered. "The prize has not been won; / Thy lute is a forgotten lute, —" "deathless trace" "nameless is the lowly spot / Where that young poet sleeps" - Beware the one-hit wonder "A few wild songs are left behind — / But what are they to fame?" - Dead person was "too sensitive" (too good for this world) and his dreams were too "vague and void" (too idealistic and dreamy, rather than pragmatic) -> Reminiscent of the man in Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree - Poet thinks its okay to die whenever/however as long as one is recognized because when one is remembered, one lives again. = Poem ends didactically "No, give me some green laurel leaves / To float down memory's wave

Shuhur Jeypore

Letitia Landon - Poet laments about a lonely English grave on foreign (Indian) soil, where no one can "weep" or "pray" over it -> Really, a lament about going abroad (particularly in search of fortune) "Alas! we do mistake, and vainly buy / Our golden idols at too great a price. / I'd rather share the lowest destiny, / That dares not look beyond the present day, / But tears on native ground, breathes native air, — / Than win the wealth of worlds beyond the wave; / And pine and perish 'neath a foreign sky."

The Lesson

Lisa Russ Spaar - The speaker describes her tutor singing an "ancient hymn in the graveyard" which transforms the setting into a mystical scene, in which the speaker imagines she is giving birth. -> What do graveyards evoke? Mystical, spiritual quality of being surrounded by the dead. Very connotative. Sensual poem, with lots of vivid, natural imagery.

Bone Orchard Lunch Hour

Lisa Russ Spaar Speaker describes a broken, yet expanding graveyard juxtaposed by the image of a girl on a cell-phone sighing "that's so not on my vagenda!" - What place do graveyards have in our everyday? How have they changed over time? What do we owe the dead? Some sort of reverence. Compare to Church Going, Philip Larkin.m

Columbarium Madrigal

Lisa Russ Spaar The speaker compares a "dovecote" outside London where pigeons "unwittingly" roosted and were "pluck(ed)" out to be roasted by cooks she touches, to a "vault in a wall of funeral apartments." The speaker believes that the dead person in the "vault" is now dispersed in nature ("you never interred in just one body."). - Nature as transformative -> "You never interred in just one body." Like Leaves of Grass or Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep - Reaction to death and dying "Withdrawn, my palm thrummed / electrically, guiltily, as today / touching your vault in a wall" - The graveyard is everywhere -> Like The African Burial Ground or Psychophotos of Hampton

Graveyard Madrigal

Lisa Russ Spaar The speaker compares a burial to a party, like Mardi Gras ("It is arrival's night. Bring on the carnival / that leads to braided cakes, the buried king."). The speaker muses on mortality, and accepts it, thinking mortality is enough ("So what if kings are made of paper-mache — their message is not charts or gold, / astrology nor horoscope a friend's death sours."). She thinks that everything is connected ("Uneasy, what house is no umbilical?"). -> Mortality, impermanence of human life and human activity Compare to Ozymandias "So what if kings are made of paper-mache — their message is not charts or gold, / astrology nor horoscope a friend's death sours." -> Reaction to grief. Party! Compare to Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep

Feast of the Mockingbird

Lisa Russ Spaar The speaker describes the atmosphere of a graveyard two days of "hard rain and fog," and the song of a mockingbird. The speaker tells how the mockingbird's song "thread(s) the badges of sun and shadow and make no light thing of these stones" in the graveyard. Lots of sound imagery -> Sound of mockingbird illuminates the "new-washed territory" of the graveyard Feeling of being in a graveyard. Eminence Compare to Church Going

Churchill's Grave

Lord Byron The speaker stands beside the grave of Charles Churchill, a satirical poet of the moment ("comet of a season"), and describes the conversation he had with "(t)he Gardener of that ground," about Churchill's grave. Byron is disheartened by the state of the grave. - What relation does the grave have to the body? Reminiscent of Letitia Landon's poem -> Here is a neglected, worn grave "The humblest of all sepulchers....On that neglected turf and quiet stone, / With name no clearer than the names unknown,/" - How long does cultural memory last? "Thus spoke he, - "I believe the man of whom / You wot, who lies in this selected tomb, / Was a most famous writer in his day, " Like Hardy's "The Roman Gravemounds" Like Landon's "The Unknown Poet's Grave." - What is the significance of a name? "On that Old Sexton's natural homily, / In which there was Obscurity and Fame, - / The Glory and the Nothing of a Name." Like Gray's elegy: "The paths of glory lead but to the grave?"

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep

Mary Elizabeth Frye The speaker is the deceased person talking to her loved one, standing at her grave. The speaker instructs her loved one (didactic tone) to not "weep" because she "did not die," but is instead apart of her loved one's favorite things in nature. - Lots of natural imagery. Cycles of nature, like cycles of life, or cycles of grief. "I am a thousand winds that blow." "I am the diamond glints on snow" "I am the sunlight on ripened grain." "I am the gentle autumn rain." "I am the swift uplifting rush" "I am the soft stars that shine at night" "I am not there. I did not die." And, very self-affirmative -> self is dispersed in nature, yet is still a self (celebratory). Affirmative like Ozymandias; "I am Ozymandias, King of Kings" - What do we owe the dead? -> What if the loved one wants to grieve? She can't experience her loved one in the same way anymore (as a person), but her loved one is instructing her not to grieve. "Do not stand at my grave and weep;" "Do not stand at my grave and cry; / I am not there, I did not die."

First Spring Flowers

Mary Howland - Mourner by the grave - Talking to flowers -> flowers a communication device to beloved. Body is literally here. Personification of the flowers: has body parts - speaker wants to kiss them. - Early after the death -> speaker is attached to physical form - Emphasis on lips and kiss -> begins with lips of flowers, ends with kissing the flowers What relation does the grave have to the body? How does nature initiate transformation and renewal (maybe it's literal -> body into flower).

Psychophotos of Hampton

Michael S. Harper The speaker describes writing at a writer's colony (Yaddo in New York), where he contemplates the complicated history of race relations (African Americans and Native Americans) in the United States. It appears that the speaker is talking to Booker T. Washington, who the speaker traces from his youth in West Virginia, to Hampton University, through the Atlanta Compromise, to Yaddo. - Explores history and memory. -> Like Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead." How history is still relevant. Everything is intertwined and interconnected -> everything is a graveyard. - How accessible should poetry be? Riddled with allusions (basically, every line is an allusion).

Enlightenment

Natasha Tretheway The speaker describes looking at a painting of Jefferson, where Jefferson's face is "rendered two toned: / his forehead white with illumination — a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow —," which she believes represents the the two-toned nature of Jefferson (the fact that Jefferson "hatred slavery," though he practiced it "out / of necessity"). The speaker reflects on how "the past holds us captive," as she remembers the conversation she had (an African American woman) with her white father about Jefferson and slavery. -> The place of the past in the present "how the past holds us captive" - everyplace is a graveyard. Reckoning with new issues (speaker and her father) as we're still dealing with old ones (Jefferson and slavery) Like For the Union Dead, Psychophotos of Hampton and The African Burial Ground.

A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire

Percy Shelley - Night is personified -> Evening, Day, Silence and Twilight are capitalized. Death for Shelley is the "serene" night - Wind & breath (psyche, soul, spirit - all associated with breath in Greek) - Sense of magic "They (Silence and Twilight) breathe their spells towards the departing day." - From above to below (night - church - dead in sepulchers (small rooms cut in rock or built of stone where dead person is laid)) - Grotesque imagery of the dead & sound "mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound" "breathed from their wormy beds...Its awful hush is felt inaudibly"

Ozymandias

Percy Shelley - Shelley tells of an imagined meeting with a traveller who describes the wrecked remains of a statue of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, Ozymandias. Ozymandias had intended this statue to be immortal, like his legacy, but really, cultural memory is transient. - What is a graveyard? - Futility of striving for immortality (legacy) "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" "Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck." - In comparison to "The Image of Lava" Question of what remains....

An Arundel Tomb

Philip Larkin - Compare to The Image in Lava, Ozymandias, The and Roman Gravemounds. What survives/remains? Is it intentional? Short cultural memory -> "What will survive of us is love" Although, this message of love was unintentional. Is the statue/memorial really the people (what relation does the memorial or the grave have to us?)? -> "The stone fidelity / They hardly meant has come to be / Their final blazon..." - The speaker describes a stone statue of an "earl and countess" holding hands. Although their identity has faded over time (now in an "unarmorial age" - cultural history AND people look at the statue of them because the detail of love is compelling rather than their importance as earl and countess ("Turn the old tenantry away; / How soon succeeding eyes begin / To look, not read."), their image continues to be important because of its message of love. From the specific to the general.

Church Going

Philip Larkin The speaker describes passing through a church, which he has be drawn to out of curiosity (rather than for religious reasons). The speaker wonders what role churches will have in the secular future (when "superstition, like belief," dies) and what will draw people to them. "Reflect the place was not worth stopping for./ Yet stop I did: in fact i often do, / And always end much at a loss like this, / Wondering what to look for; wondering, too, / When churches will fall completely out of use / What we shall turn them into,/ - Why do we go to churchyards, or graveyards? What reverence do we owe them? Why do we feel drawn to them? -> "I wonder who / Will be the last, the very last, to seek / This place for what it was; /...Borden, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt / Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground / Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt / So long and equably what since is found / Only in separation - marriage, and birth..." Notion of duty in here -> to visit sacred places. Retain cultural memory. - back to Churchill's Grave or The Roman Gravemounds -> "Since someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious, / And gravitating with it to this ground, / Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, / If only that so many dead lie round."

Home Burial

Robert Frost The poem reads like an excerpt from a short story, describing a conversation/debate between a husband and wife (from the narrator's point of view) about a child's death (how long grieving should last). - Young death -> death of a child - What does it do to a person to have death so close? "Home Burial" -> burial at home "If you had any feelings, you that dug / With your own hand — how could you? — his little grave;/" - What does death do to the ones we leave behind? "Home Burial -> death of home life - What do we owe the dead? Husband: "The little graveyard where my people are!/...On the sidehill. We haven't to mind those." "What was it brought you up to think it the thing / To take your mother-loss of a first child / So inconsolably — in the face of love. / You'd think his memory might be satisfied —" Wife: "No, from the time when one is sick to death, / One is along, and he dies more alone. / Friends make presence of following to the grave / But before one is in it, their minds are turned / And making the best of their way back to life/" - Relationship between the grave and the body From the wife: "You could sit there with the stains on your shoes / Of the fresh earth from your own baby's grave / And talk about your everyday concerns." Wife implies that the husband has some role in the baby's death this way. - Emotions of the grieving process -> Wife is sorrowful -> Husband displaces emotions. Angry at wife for grieving. Ex: "'I'm cursed. God, if I don't believe I'm cursed.'"

The Wood-pile

Robert Frost - Narrative - Natural imagery - Speaker describes a winter walk in the woods, where he comes upon a pile of wood that is decaying and wonders about the character of the person who made it and left it there. - Woodpile (nature) standing in for a body like "Lines Left Upon a Seat In A Yew-Tree." An accidental memorial. - Decay as a process "To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay."

For the Union Dead

Robert Lowell - Reflection on monuments, and also on history (the pace of history -> ephemerality of media and the times). Message that old history is still relevant (statues, the Old South), even as time speeds up (ads, Hiroshima (nuclear age), segregation -> "Colonel Shaw / is riding on his bible / he waits / for the blessed break"). New problems as we're still grappling with old ones. - Lyrical confession and satire - Begins with the Boston aquarium -> fish are then transformed into machines signaling a loss of childhood pleasures/innocence. Fish of the aquarium are turned into "giant finned cars nos(ing) forward like fish" at the end of the poem. Then, describes a statue of Colonel Shaw and "his bell-cheeked Negro infantry" and describes their history ("two months after marching through Boston / half of the regiment was dead:") which turns into the "monument (which) sticks like a fishbone / in the city's throat" and "the drained faces of Negro school-children" who "rise like balloons" on the TV. -> All history is connected and relevant. Fish and racial equality are transformed throughout the poem. The "savage servility" that "slides by on grease" can't continue. - What place do monuments have in our lives? Should we still construct them?

The Soldier

Rupert Brooke The speaker tells his reader that if he dies, he will colonize the foreign earth in which he lies. - Compare to "Drummer Hodge" -> Utility of death -> colonizing a foreign land "That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England" -> Death as an act of patriotism -> like In Flanders Fields "There shall be / In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; / A dust whom England bore, shaped made aware....Gives somewhere back the thought by England given;" -> Death as a continuation of life or transformation? In this poem, the speaker remains separate from the landscape = "In that rich earth a richer dust concealed" In Drummer Hodge, Hodge becomes a tiny aspect of the landscape ("Yet portion of that unknown plain / Will Hodge forever be; / His homely Northern breast and brain / Grow to some Southern tree").

Mid-Term Break

Seamus Heaney The speaker tells of the day his four-year old brother died. The only emotion the speaker expresses is embarrassment ("When I came in, and I was embarrassed / By old men standing up to shake my hand"), which shows how numb he is (a stage of grief). The poem reflects on the roles we play during death and dying (speaker is in a new role now). - Young death -> death of a child "A four foot box, a foot for every year." Time cut short -> seen in five meter stanzas = the missing year, as brother is 4 when he dies Unnatural - see title of Mid-Term Break Connotation of a holiday, but also an accident. Strange juxtaposition. -> As compared to Housman's "To An Athlete Dying Young" where young death is praised. - External observation, lack of emotion from speaker. Distorted passage of time. -> Imperative of "Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep"?

Home On Leave

Stephen Cushman

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Thomas Gray -"The paths of glory lead but to the grave" = Death as the great equalizer Don't judge the poor country folk. Didn't have money or education. - Natural imagery viewed by poet -> Ploughman coming home, sun setting, sounds of beetles and owls From above to below - Poet imagines the lives lived by the dead below -> Individual, family, group - Poet imagines his death and epitaph

The Clasped Skeletons

Thomas Hardy - Speaker describes the "uncover(ing)" of clasped skeletons (two lovers) and reflects on famous lovers in history (like Helena and Paris, or David and Bathsheba) who would make these two lovers, in comparison, look like recent history. - Encounter with something from an ancient time. - Time is relative "Yet what is length of time? But dream!...But so far earlier theirs beside / Your life-span and career, / That they might style of yestertide / Your coming here!" - Universal behavior -> lovers

Lament

Thomas Hardy - The speaker laments about all the things a dead loved one enjoyed ("How she would have loved / A party to-day!," Or she would have reigned / At a dinner to-night," "And she would have sought / With a child's eager glance / The shy snowdrops..") and would have continued to enjoy if she were still alive, that the people alive cannot enjoy ("And never to cloy her / As us they cloy!...) The speaker emphasizes the finality of the loved one's death, by repeating "she is shut, she is shut" in 3 out of 4 stanzas. - Death as a prison -> not transformative leading to new life "She is shut, she is shut/...In the jailing shell / of her tiny sell." "She is shut under grass" "She is shut, she is shut / From the cheer of them, dead / To all done and said/" -> Reminiscent of dead shut in their sepulchers in Shelley's "A Summer Evening" - Death's permanence "Wholly possessed / By an infinite rest!"

The Roman Gravemounds

Thomas Hardy - The speaker watches a man with a "basket and spade" in Rome and assumes that the man is looking for "Rome's dim relics." Really, the man is making a grave for his "little white cat." - Question of what remains and what we remember -> The transience of cultural memory "And he delves in the ancient dead's long home; / Their fames, their achievements, the man knows not; / The furred things is all to him — nothing Rome!" What do we owe the dead? - Ironic -> Also because the poet memorializes the man digging a grave for his cat in the graveyards of Roman civilization, rather than Rome "Well, Rome's rule here is oft and again / A theme for the sages of history, / And the small furred life was worth no one's pen / Yet its mourner's mood has a charm for me."

Drummer Hodge

Thomas Hardy - The speaker wistfully describes the burial and resting place of Drummer Hodge (a drummer in the Boer War"). The speaker expresses sorrow for Drummer Hodge who will forever lie in in foreign ground, stating that "portion of that unknown plain / Will Hodge for ever be; ..... And strange-eyed constellations reign / His stars eternally." - Reminiscent of Letitia Landon's Shuhur Jeypore -> problem of dying abroad - Nature transforming the dead -> like Leaves of Grass "His homely Northern breast and brain / Grow to some Southern Tree,"

Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard

Thomas Hardy Each stanza is devoted to a different "voice" in the "churchyard." Each voice comes from a dead person that has grown into a plant in the churchyard. - Nature is transformative. Nature & renewal -> new life. People are proud of vegetal selves - creepy -> Like Leaves of Grass and God's Acre - Death as the great equalizer -> Different people in different stages of life now equal as plants in the same churchyard, all saying the same line ("All day cheerily, / All night eerily!") "These flowers are I, poor Fanny Hurd," "- I am one Bachelor Bowring, 'Gent' /....In my feat of change from a coffin-thrall / To dancer in green as leaves on a wall." "- I, these berries of juice and gloss, / Am clear forgotten as Thomas Voss." "- The Lady Gertrude, proud, high-bred/...Am I - this laurel that shades your head;" "- I, who as innocent with wind climb /...Am one Eve Greensleeves, in olden time/"

The Voice

Thomas Hardy In this poem, the speaker questions whether the sound he is hearing is the voice of his dead beloved, or just the wind creating an illusion. - Stages of grief -> Grief gives us false hope. Maybe compare to In Memoriam XIV - Nature and the dead. Nature keeps the dead (holds their spirit)?

During Wind and Rain

Thomas Hardy The speaker describes four scenes (of singing, gardening, breakfasting and moving), which juxtapose the onset of an imagined storm (nature) and *the years" (aging). The poem ends with the characters dying ("down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs"), demonstrating the triumph of nature over human efforts. - Maybe similar to The Grass -> triumph of nature. Nature vs humans. Nature is immortal and always prevails. - All in present tense -> remembered past? - Speaker is distant. Doesn't sympathize with characters

Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?

Thomas Hardy The speaker is the dead person who wonders who is digging on his grave. She suggests different people important to her during his life ("My loved one," "My nearest dearest kin," "My enemy," My "little dog") as she asks "Ah, are you digging on my grave?" because she assumes that she is still important to those people, but really, everyone has forgotten about her. It turns out the dead person's dog is digging on his grave, but only to hide a bone — not as an act of remembrance to her owner. - A comment on vanity - A comment on memory -> how long does memory last? Like the Roman Gravemounds (cultural memory) - What do we owe the dead? -> Mourning has a limited time frame -> self-interest prevails ---- The loved one: 'It cannot hurt her now,' he said, / 'That I should not be true.'" ---- The nearest dearest kin: "'What good will planting flowers produce? / No tendance of her mound can loose / her spirit from Death's gin.'" ---- The enemy: "She thought you no more worth her hate, / And cares not where you lie." ---- The dog: "I am sorry, but I quite forgot / It was your resting-place." -> Dog has the last word. - Ironic tone -> bolstered by the triple line

Rain on a Grave

Thomas Hardy The speaker stands in front of his lover's grave while it rains, and thinks about how his lover would have reacted to rain while she was living. The lover also wishes that he could be with her in death. Finally, the lover imagines "green blades" and *daisies" that will soon be growing from her grave, and is comforted that something beautiful will come out of loss. - Nature & renewal -> hope - like Leaves of Grass "Soon will be growing / Green blades from her mound, / And daisies will be showing / Like stars on the ground, / Till she form part of them - / Ay - the sweet heart of them, / Loved beyond measure / With a child's pleasure / All her life's round."

By Her Aunt's Grave

Thomas Hardy The speaker tells how her aunt gave her "six pence a week" for "eighty weeks or near" to pay for the aunt's "headstone when she died." However, now it has been over a year since the aunt died and the girl has still not "fixed" her headstone. The poem ends with the girl's boyfriend convincing her to spend the money on a "dance to-night at the Load of Hay" because the aunt "won't know." - What do we owe the dead? Like "Ah, are you digging on my grave?" -> Self-interest prevails. Hedonism. But also ironic that the girl only "passively" nods ("She passively nods, and they go that way"), barely convinced by her boyfriend to spend the money on a dance, rather than on her aunt. - Ironic tone -> Bolstered by the explicit dialogue

Funeral Blues

W. H. Auden The speaker is a grieving loved one, whose great despair ("He was my North, my South, my East and West, / My working week and my Sunday rest / My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; /... The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, / Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, / Pour away the ocean and sweep up the words; / For nothing now can ever come to any good.") prompts her to re-imagine the world as changed by (and command the world to change because of -> "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,/) this grief as well. - Experience of grief from the perspective of the corner. -> Externalizing loss. Grief as all-consuming. In contrast, to "Do not stand at my grave and weep" -> where the loved one is not allowed to grieve, and the loved one is not given a perspective (only the dead person has a voice). - Natural imagery -> of the externalized grief. From house to town to world. "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone" TO "Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead / Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead." TO "The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, / Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,"

Leaves of Grass (from Song of Myself)

Walt Whitman - Written in free verse (narrative/story form). Line breaks based on emphasis - Narrator ruminates on the nature of grass (and the role of the natural world in death) after a child asks, "What is the grass?" - Poet as a wanderer and questioner "How could I answer the child?...I do not know what it is any more than he." Compare this to "We Are Seven" -> speaker is much more receptive to the child's perspective in this poem AND to nature (the natural way of life -> listening to nature = - "O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!" - Nature & renewal -> "It (the grass) may be you transpire from the breasts of young men...It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps..." -> "The smallest sprout shows there is really no death/ And if ever there was it led forward life..." Source of admiration for the narrator "All goes onward and outward...and nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier."

Strange Meeting

Wilfred Owen The speaker describes a "strange meeting" with another soldier in hell, which resembles the trenches ("Down some profound dull tunnel...Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned...") The other solider turns out to be the soldier who killed him ("I am the enemy you killed, my friend.") - A lament against war "The pity of war, the pity war distilled...None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress." "To miss the march of this retreating world / Into vain citadels that are not walled" Death as an escape "It seems out of battle I escaped..." (to Hell he realizes -> "By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.") "Let us sleep now..." - What do we owe the dead? To stop "trek(ing) from progress"

Anthem for Doomed Youth

Wilfred Owen The speaker compares the ways in which dying and funerals rites are conducted normally, to the ways in which they are performed at war -> "passing bells" are the "monstrous anger of the guns" -> "choirs" are "wailing shells" and "bugles calling for them from sad shires" -> "candles" are the boys dying "eyes" -> "pall(s)" are "the pallor of girls' brows" -> "flowers" are "the tenderness of patient minds" -> "drawing-down of blinds" are "each slow dusk" - Written in the form of a sonnet (1) Dying rites (2) Funeral rites - Lament against war -> "What passing-bells for those who die as cattle? - Challenge to McCrae's In Flanders Fields glorifying war. War is inhumane. - What do we owe the dead? To not doom any more youth

Lines Left Upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree

William Wordsworth - Speaker reflecting on a monument to false pride and contempt of others "pride, / Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, / Is littleness" -> Man who left the seat in a yew-tree was "no common soul" and was "against all enemies prepared / All but neglect" leading him to "sustain" his "soul / In solitude." - Importance of agency in life -> Can't expect that the world owes you anything. Success in life is dependent on relations with other people = must develop inter-personal skills. "The man whose eye / Is every on himself doth look on one, / The least of Nature's works..."

We are Seven

William Wordsworth - Speaker's conversation with a little girl (eight years old) who says her family consists of seven people, but really, as the speaker insists, there are only five living members. - Different understandings of death and life -> what death means. Are the people gone? For how long? Two of the little girl's siblings "at Conway dwell" (Jane and John) and "two are gone to sea." The two siblings at sea will eventually come back, although the ones at Conway are dead. However, the little girl equates the two departures because the two siblings graves "may be seen," and she often eats her "supper," knits her stockings, sings and hems her "kerchief" there, so in a way the dead siblings are more alive than the ones who have gone to sea. "'How many are you, then," said I, / 'If they two are in heaven?' / Quick was the little Maid's reply, / 'O Master! we are seven." - Keeping the dead company -> What do we owe the dead?

The Two April Mornings

William Wordsworth The speaker reflects back on a walk with "village schoolmaster" Matthew, where Matthew saw a cloud with a "long purple cleft" that reminded him of the day he visited his daughter's, Emma's, grave. The speaker remembers Matthew to celebrate Matthew. - Memory and haunting -> Where are the dead? "Six feet in earth my Emma lay" "And, turning from her grave, I met...A blooming Girl...Her brow was smooth and white:" "Matthew is in his grave, yet now, / Methinks, I see him stand," - Mourning - Many doublings and mirroring -> Two April mornings -> Two daughters - Emma and the "blooming girl" -> Two clouds -> Two memories - memory of Matthew ("Matthew is in his grave, yet now, / Methinks, I see him stand,") and Matthew's memory of visiting Emma's grave ("And, to the church-yard come, stopped short / Beside my daughter's grave.") -> Two sighs Matthew's sigh with Wordsworth when he remembers visiting Emma's grave Matthew's sigh after seeing the Blooming Girl beside Emma's grave

The African Burial Ground

Yusef Komunyakaa The speaker describes "the African burial ground" in New York, which was "most easily forgotten." The speaker questions the lack of reverence given to the Africans who built the US ("came to work fields of barley & flax" and "built tongue & groove") and criticizes the pace of American culture ("going from major to minor pieties, / always on the go."). - To what extent does the burial ground represent the dead? Should it? Compare to Jesuit Graves, Charles Wright - History and memory. The dead so quickly forgotten and their graveyard converted into something new ("Did descendants & newcomers / shoulder rock & heave loose gravel / into the landfill before building crews / came, their guitars & harmonicas / chasing away ghosts at lunch break?") Compare to Psychophotos of Hampton, Michael S. Harper - The pace of American culture "going from major to minor pieties, / always on the go" Compare to For the Union Dead, Robert Lowell - What happens after death? "The click of heels / the tap of a drum awakening the dead." Like God's Acre? Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Dead in ground waiting for resurrection.