A garland of quotations LXIII
Culled from the finest cadavers in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
A person wept the livelong night beside a sick man’s bed :
When it dawned the sick was well, and the mourner, he was dead.
•Sâdi, The Rose Garden (1258).
Put bunches of roses all over my coffin,
Roses to deaden the clods as they fall.
•“The Streets of Laredo” (trad.).
This is the desert, this the solitude:
How populous, how vital, is the grave!
•Young, Night Thoughts (1742).
At afternoon funerals wear a frock coat and top hat. Should the funeral be your own, the hat may be dispensed with.
•Chester Field Jr., The Cynic’s Rules of Conduct (1905).
Take your delight in momentariness,
Walk between dark and dark—a shining space
With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.
•Robert Graves, “Sick Love” (1929).
Better is it in a life like ours to be even a howling Dervish or a dancing Shaker, confronting imaginary demons with Thalaba’s talisman of Faith, than to lose the consciousness of our own spiritual nature, and look upon ourselves as mere brute masses of animal organization—barnacles on a dead universe; looking into the dull grave with no hope beyond it; earth gazing into earth, and saying to corruption, “thou art my father,” and to the worm, “thou art my sister.”
•Whittier, The Supernaturalism of New England (1847).
Three things follow a dead person to the grave and two of them return while one remains with him. His family, his wealth and his deeds follow him; his family return home with his wealth, but his deeds remain.
•Tabrizi, Mishkat al-Masâbih (C14).
Lette alle mie faultes bee buried ynne the grave;
Alle obloquyes be rotted wythe mie duste;
Lette him fyrst carpen that no wemmes have: | wemmes=faults
’Tys paste mannes nature for to bee aie juste.
•Chatterton, Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and Others in the Fifteenth Century; The Greatest Part Now First Published from the Most Authentic Copies (1777).
The authorities of Berlin in honour of the Emperor considered it no sin,
To decorate with crape the beautiful city of Berlin;
Therefore Berlin I declare was a city of crape,
Because few buildings crape decoration did escape.
•McGonagall, “The Funeral of the German Emperor” (1890).
I know of people in the Grave
Who would be very glad
To know the news I know tonight
If they the chance had had.
’Tis this expands the least event
And swells the scantest deed—
My right to walk upon the Earth
If they this moment had.
•Dickinson, “I know of people in the Grave” (c. 1884?).
References: Sâdi: trans. Edward B. Eastwick (Octagon, 1974); Graves: Collected Poems (Doubleday, 1966); Tabrizi: Neal Robinson, The Sayings of Muhammad (Ecco, 1998); McGonagall: Poetic Gems; Dickinson: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Little Brown, 1976); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.