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Back Poems and Readings for Funerals Save as PDF
Chapters (98)
  1. Cover
  2. About the Author
  3. Foreword
  4. REMEMBER ME WHEN I AM GONE AWAY …
  5. ‘Remember me when I am gone away’
  6. Heaven-Haven
  7. Life Goes On
  8. Living Each Day
  9. ‘Death is nothing at all’
  10. Remember Me
  11. ‘I’m here for a short visit only’
  12. ‘No longer mourn for me when I am dead’
  13. If Death is Kind
  14. Fare Well
  15. When I Died
  16. ‘Because I could not stop for Death’
  17. ‘I see myself now at the end of my journey’
  18. Requiem
  19. ‘I thought I’d write my own obituary’
  20. Think of Me Then
  21. The New Path
  22. Footprints in the Sand
  23. The Book
  24. The Legacy
  25. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’
  26. When I Have Fears
  27. A Song of Living
  28. ‘I should like to be buried in a summer forest’
  29. ‘I would not have a god come in’
  30. I’ve Made Out a Will
  31. Coda
  32. Rest
  33. Prayer
  34. A TINY LAMP HAS GONE OUT IN MY TENT …
  35. ‘You must not shut the night inside you’
  36. Prayer for the Little Daughter between Death and Burial
  37. Epitaph on a Child
  38. On the Death of a Child
  39. Four Candles
  40. Too Soon
  41. Requiescat
  42. ‘Promise you won’t forget about me, ever’
  43. HE WAS MY NORTH, MY SOUTH, MY EAST AND WEST …
  44. Funeral Blues
  45. ‘Music, when soft voices die’
  46. ‘As birds are fitted to the boughs’
  47. Farewell, Sweet Dust
  48. Echo
  49. The Kaleidoscope
  50. Verses Written on Her Deathbed at Bath to Her Husband in London
  51. A Widow’s Hymn
  52. ‘Time does not bring relief’
  53. Tomorrows
  54. ‘Never more will the wind’
  55. Marriage and Death
  56. Inseparable
  57. ‘Dear gentle soul, who went so soon away’
  58. In Memoriam E. S.
  59. WORN FEATURES OF ANCESTRAL MOULD …
  60. Highland Graveyard
  61. ‘Another and another and another’
  62. ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’
  63. ‘By ways remote and distant waters sped’
  64. ‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore’
  65. Elegy
  66. I Wish You Enough
  67. While I Slept
  68. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’
  69. Coat
  70. ‘The rooms and days we wandered through’
  71. The Friend
  72. ‘You can shed tears that she is gone’
  73. Inside Our Dreams
  74. Traditional Gaelic Blessing
  75. TO EVERY THING THERE IS A SEASON …
  76. ‘To every thing there is a season’
  77. ‘Our revels now are ended’
  78. So Many Different Lengths of Time
  79. ‘Come, fill the Cup’
  80. ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth’
  81. ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels’
  82. ‘Death be not proud’
  83. ‘Home is where one starts from’
  84. Dirge without Music
  85. ‘don’t tell me that I mourn too much’
  86. All Things Pass
  87. Earth
  88. On Death
  89. Gone from My Sight
  90. The Wheel
  91. Live Your Life
  92. Prayer
  93. Old Irish Toast
  94. For My Own Tomb-stone
  95. Notes
  96. Acknowledgements
  97. JULIA WATSON
  98. THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

4. Kindertotenlieder. This extract is from the first of five poems set to music by Gustav Mahler.

5. ‘Another and another and another’. James Henry was a Dublin doctor whose poems lay in the Cambridge University Library until discovered by the literary critic Christopher Ricks in the 1990s. Henry was fiercely opposed to traditional organized religion.

6. ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’. thunder-stone: thunder-bolt. It was thought that the noise of thunder was made by meteorites falling to the earth.

7. ‘The rooms and days we wandered through’. The last line translates as ‘Do not be afraid, I am with you.’

8. ‘You can shed tears that she is gone’ was read at the funeral of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, 9 April 2002.

9. ‘don’t tell me that I mourn too much’. Michael Rosen’s poem is part of a sequence he wrote following the sudden death from meningitis of his eighteen-year-old son Eddie.

10. ‘All Things Pass’. Lao-Tzu was a Chinese philosopher and reputed founder of the Taoist religion. He is credited with writing the Tao Te Ching: tao means the way of all life; te, the fit use of life by men; and ching, text or classic.

11. ‘Gone from My Sight’. Henry Van Dyke was an American Presbyterian minister, literary critic and writer. In 1896 he published the hugely popular The Story of the Other Wise Man, which is about the fourth Magus and his journey to visit the newly born Christ child.

12. ‘Live Your Life’. Tecumseh was a Native American chief who, with his brother Tenskwatawa, a religious visionary known as ‘The Prophet’, tried to unite the various tribes into an alliance against the expansion of the United States into the Midwest in the early nineteenth century.

13. ‘Prayer’. The hymn ‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace is a version of this prayer by St Francis of Assissi.

Acknowledgements

SIMON ARMITGAGE: ‘I thought I’d write my own obituary’ and ‘I’ve Made Out a Will’ from Book of Matches by Simon Armitage. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber.

W.H. AUDEN: ‘Funeral Blues’ from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber.

GEORGE BARKER: ‘In Memonum E. S.’ from Collected Poems by George Barker. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber.

NOËL COWARD: ‘I’m here for a short visit only’ and ‘When I Have Fears’ from Collected Verse by Noël Coward (Methuen Publishing Ltd, 1984). Copyright © the estate of Noël Coward.

WALTER DE LA MARE: ‘Fare Well’ by Walter de la Mare. By kind permission of the Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and the Society of Authors as their representatives.