Do Not Go Gentle
poems for funerals
Published on 25. September 2003
Book
Paperback/Softback
96 pages
978-1-85224-635-8 (ISBN)
Description
This wide-ranging selection combines popular choices of traditional poems read at funerals with powerful poems by contemporary writers more tuned to our present age of doubt and disbelief. There are poems here for churchgoers and believers, including classic verses of grief and consolation by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, the anonymous Do not stand at my grave and weep, and the poems read at Princess Diana's funeral. But there are also poems for people of all faiths and religions, for agnostics and atheists, and most importantly for those who aren't sure what they believe, whose grief over loss is the more intense for not knowing what happens to the soul after death.
Grief isn't denied but experienced and made more bearable by being put into memorable words. Searing poems of lament are followed by moving elegies celebrating the lives of those we will always love. Whether and how the spirit survives is then explored in an extraordinary gathering of poems by writers as different and diverse as the Persian mystic Rumi, Zen Buddhist composers of Japanese haiku, and American poets Mary Oliver and Jane Kenyon. Buttressed against their assertions of faith in an afterlife are modern sceptics, from Auden and Larkin to William Carlos Williams and C.K. Williams, whose wrestling with the meaning of death helps us make sense of no sense, mirroring our own anxieties and difficulties. But however various and contradictory these poems, their message chimes with Larkin's famous words, proving 'Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.' Unlike other poetry anthologies of loss, mourning and remembrance, Do Not Go Gentle offers a selection of poems specifically for reading at funerals and memorial services. It can also be used for reading aloud to friends and family, or for reading while numbed and bewildered - all times when the right poem can help us share and bear the burden of immediate grief.
Grief isn't denied but experienced and made more bearable by being put into memorable words. Searing poems of lament are followed by moving elegies celebrating the lives of those we will always love. Whether and how the spirit survives is then explored in an extraordinary gathering of poems by writers as different and diverse as the Persian mystic Rumi, Zen Buddhist composers of Japanese haiku, and American poets Mary Oliver and Jane Kenyon. Buttressed against their assertions of faith in an afterlife are modern sceptics, from Auden and Larkin to William Carlos Williams and C.K. Williams, whose wrestling with the meaning of death helps us make sense of no sense, mirroring our own anxieties and difficulties. But however various and contradictory these poems, their message chimes with Larkin's famous words, proving 'Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.' Unlike other poetry anthologies of loss, mourning and remembrance, Do Not Go Gentle offers a selection of poems specifically for reading at funerals and memorial services. It can also be used for reading aloud to friends and family, or for reading while numbed and bewildered - all times when the right poem can help us share and bear the burden of immediate grief.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 6 mm
Weight
133 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-635-8 (9781852246358)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
03/2014
1st Edition
Bloodaxe Books Ltd
€7.49
Available for download
Person
Neil Astley is the editor of Bloodaxe Books which he founded in 1978. His books include many anthologies, most notably those in the Staying Alive series: Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004), Being Human (2011) and Staying Human (2020), along with four collaborations with Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Soul Food (2007) and Soul Feast (2024), and the DVD-books In Person: 30 Poets and In Person: World Poets. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry, and has published two poetry collections, Darwin Survivor and Biting My Tongue, as well as two novels, The End of My Tether (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award), and The Sheep Who Changed the World. He was given a D.Litt from Newcastle University for his work with Bloodaxe Books in 1995; is a patron and past trustee of Ledbury Poetry Festival; and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. He lives in the Tarset valley in Northumberland.
Content
1: STOP ALL THE CLOCKS: poems of grief
W.H. Auden 10 Funeral Blues
C.K. Williams 10 Wept
Norman MacCaig 12 Memorial
R.S. Thomas 12 Comparisons
Christina Rossetti 13 Remember
Linda Pastan 14 The Five Stages of Grief
Rudyard Kipling 15 The Widower
Janet Frame 16 The Suicides
George Herbert 17 Life
Robert Herrick 17 Epitaph Upon a Child That Died
Edwin Muir 18 The Child Dying
Ben Jonson 19 On My First Sonne
Hugh O'Donnell 19 Light
D.J. Enright 20 On the Death of a Child
Anonymous 20 The Unquiet Grave
Emily Bronte 21 Remembrance
James Russell Lowell 22 After the Burial
Adrian Mitchell 24 Especially When It Snows
2: LIVES ENRICHED: poems of celebration
Edgar A. Guest 26 Because He Lived
Robert Burns 26 Epitaph on a Friend
Brendan Kennelly 27 The Good
Stephen Dobyns 28 When a Friend
William Shakespeare 29 Cleopatra's Lament for Antony
William Shakespeare 30 Dirge for Fidele
David Constantine 31 'We say the dead depart'
Anonymous 32 'Not, how did he die, but how did he live?'
Alfred, Lord Tennyson 32 from In Memoriam A.H.H.
Langston Hughes 33 As Be?ts a Man
Joyce Grenfell 33 from Joyce: By Herself and Her Friends
William Carlos Williams 34 Tract
Raymond Carver 36 Gravy
Basho 36 Haiku
3: I AM NOT THERE: body?&?spirit
Anonymous 38 'Do not stand at my grave and weep'
Christina Rossetti 38 Song
Mary Lee Hall 39 Turn Again to Life
Henry van Dyke 39 For Katrina's Sun Dial
Bhartrhari 40 'Thinking I enjoyed the pleasures of life'
D.H. Lawrence 40 Demiurge
Gail Holst-Warhaft 41 In the End Is the Body
Pablo Neruda 42 Sonnet lxxxix
Issa 42 Haiku
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri 43 The Soul Driven from the Body
Devara Dasimayya 43 'I'm the one who has the body'
Ruth Pitter 44 The Paradox
Rumi 44 'Everything you see'
4: THE DYING OF THE LIGHT: pain?&?resolution
Dylan Thomas 46 Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
W.E. Henley 46 Invictus
David Wright 47 Arcadia
Czeslaw Milosz 49 On Parting with My Wife, Janina
Pamela Gillilan 50 from When You Died
Philip Larkin 52 Aubade
C.K. Williams 53 from Le Petit Salvie
Anne Stevenson 57 The Minister
Virginia Hamilton Adair 58 A Last Marriage
5: THE OTHER SIDE: comfort?&?haunting
Jane Kenyon 60 Notes from the Other Side
Thom Gunn 60 The Reassurance
Patricia Pogson 61 Breath
C.K. Williams 62 Oh
Ken Smith 63 Years go by
Brendan Kennelly 64 I See You Dancing, Father
Patrick Kavanagh 65 In Memory of My Mother
Billy Collins 66 The Dead
Vladimir Holan 66 Resurrection
Charles Causley 67 Eden Rock
Jeanne Willis 67 Inside Our Dreams
Meera 68 Song
Shiki 68 Haiku
6: NOTHING DIES: release?&?letting go
Emily Dickinson 70 After Great Pain
Mary Oliver 70 In Blackwater Woods
Walt Whitman 71 from Song of Myself
Rumi 73 Unmarked Boxes
Mona Van Duyn 74 The Creation
Thomas Hardy 77 Heredity
Alice Walker 78 'Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning
David Ignatow 78 Kaddish
R.S. Thomas 79 A Marriage
Wendell Berry 80 Three Elegiac Poems
Jane Kenyon 82 In the Nursing Home
Rumi 82 'Why cling'
Mary Oliver 83 When Death Comes
Stevie Smith 84 Come, Death
John Donne 84 'Death be not proud'
Anne Ridler 85 Nothing Is Lost
Jane Kenyon 86 Let Evening Come
Louis MacNeice 87 from Autumn Journal
Anonymous 87 A Celtic Blessing
Raymond Carver 88 No Need
Alden Nowlan 88 This Is What I Wante to Sign Off With
Raymond Carver 89 Late Fragment
Pablo Neruda 89 Dead Woman
Kaniyan Punkunran 90 Every Town a Home Town
Brendan Kennelly 91 Begin
92 Acknowledgements
95 Index of writers
W.H. Auden 10 Funeral Blues
C.K. Williams 10 Wept
Norman MacCaig 12 Memorial
R.S. Thomas 12 Comparisons
Christina Rossetti 13 Remember
Linda Pastan 14 The Five Stages of Grief
Rudyard Kipling 15 The Widower
Janet Frame 16 The Suicides
George Herbert 17 Life
Robert Herrick 17 Epitaph Upon a Child That Died
Edwin Muir 18 The Child Dying
Ben Jonson 19 On My First Sonne
Hugh O'Donnell 19 Light
D.J. Enright 20 On the Death of a Child
Anonymous 20 The Unquiet Grave
Emily Bronte 21 Remembrance
James Russell Lowell 22 After the Burial
Adrian Mitchell 24 Especially When It Snows
2: LIVES ENRICHED: poems of celebration
Edgar A. Guest 26 Because He Lived
Robert Burns 26 Epitaph on a Friend
Brendan Kennelly 27 The Good
Stephen Dobyns 28 When a Friend
William Shakespeare 29 Cleopatra's Lament for Antony
William Shakespeare 30 Dirge for Fidele
David Constantine 31 'We say the dead depart'
Anonymous 32 'Not, how did he die, but how did he live?'
Alfred, Lord Tennyson 32 from In Memoriam A.H.H.
Langston Hughes 33 As Be?ts a Man
Joyce Grenfell 33 from Joyce: By Herself and Her Friends
William Carlos Williams 34 Tract
Raymond Carver 36 Gravy
Basho 36 Haiku
3: I AM NOT THERE: body?&?spirit
Anonymous 38 'Do not stand at my grave and weep'
Christina Rossetti 38 Song
Mary Lee Hall 39 Turn Again to Life
Henry van Dyke 39 For Katrina's Sun Dial
Bhartrhari 40 'Thinking I enjoyed the pleasures of life'
D.H. Lawrence 40 Demiurge
Gail Holst-Warhaft 41 In the End Is the Body
Pablo Neruda 42 Sonnet lxxxix
Issa 42 Haiku
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri 43 The Soul Driven from the Body
Devara Dasimayya 43 'I'm the one who has the body'
Ruth Pitter 44 The Paradox
Rumi 44 'Everything you see'
4: THE DYING OF THE LIGHT: pain?&?resolution
Dylan Thomas 46 Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
W.E. Henley 46 Invictus
David Wright 47 Arcadia
Czeslaw Milosz 49 On Parting with My Wife, Janina
Pamela Gillilan 50 from When You Died
Philip Larkin 52 Aubade
C.K. Williams 53 from Le Petit Salvie
Anne Stevenson 57 The Minister
Virginia Hamilton Adair 58 A Last Marriage
5: THE OTHER SIDE: comfort?&?haunting
Jane Kenyon 60 Notes from the Other Side
Thom Gunn 60 The Reassurance
Patricia Pogson 61 Breath
C.K. Williams 62 Oh
Ken Smith 63 Years go by
Brendan Kennelly 64 I See You Dancing, Father
Patrick Kavanagh 65 In Memory of My Mother
Billy Collins 66 The Dead
Vladimir Holan 66 Resurrection
Charles Causley 67 Eden Rock
Jeanne Willis 67 Inside Our Dreams
Meera 68 Song
Shiki 68 Haiku
6: NOTHING DIES: release?&?letting go
Emily Dickinson 70 After Great Pain
Mary Oliver 70 In Blackwater Woods
Walt Whitman 71 from Song of Myself
Rumi 73 Unmarked Boxes
Mona Van Duyn 74 The Creation
Thomas Hardy 77 Heredity
Alice Walker 78 'Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning
David Ignatow 78 Kaddish
R.S. Thomas 79 A Marriage
Wendell Berry 80 Three Elegiac Poems
Jane Kenyon 82 In the Nursing Home
Rumi 82 'Why cling'
Mary Oliver 83 When Death Comes
Stevie Smith 84 Come, Death
John Donne 84 'Death be not proud'
Anne Ridler 85 Nothing Is Lost
Jane Kenyon 86 Let Evening Come
Louis MacNeice 87 from Autumn Journal
Anonymous 87 A Celtic Blessing
Raymond Carver 88 No Need
Alden Nowlan 88 This Is What I Wante to Sign Off With
Raymond Carver 89 Late Fragment
Pablo Neruda 89 Dead Woman
Kaniyan Punkunran 90 Every Town a Home Town
Brendan Kennelly 91 Begin
92 Acknowledgements
95 Index of writers