Time, Memory and Mortality
Explore how works preserve and reassess lived experience through passing time, memory, ageing and mortality.
35 items
Dirge
A speaker who says he has been slain by a cruel beloved calls on death to come, orders his own shroud and coffin, and asks to be buried where no flower, friend or grieving lover can ever find the grave.
Poetry · PoemSHALL I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
The speaker asks whether to compare the beloved to a summer day, finds the beloved more lovely and temperate than summer’s brief and changeable beauty, and promises that these enduring lines will preserve that beauty and life as long as people can breathe or see.
Poetry · PoemA Farewell to the World
The speaker bids a false world good night, recounts how it abused his early years and rewarded rumour, envy and ignorance, and resolves to bear age, sickness and misfortune with strengths kept at home rather than seek peace by wandering.
Poetry · PoemOn Elizabeth L. H.
An epitaph stops the passing reader, states that the stone covers as much beauty and virtue as could die, asks that any fault stay buried, and withholds the second name so that only "Elizabeth" is spoken.
Poetry · PoemOn Salathiel Pavy
An epitaph asks readers to weep for a boy of scarcely thirteen who had already spent three years as the stage's finest performer, and claims that the Fates, deceived by how truly he played old men, took him by mistake and now cannot get him back from Heaven.
Poetry · PoemThe Funeral
Instructing whoever will shroud his body not to disturb the wreath of hair on his arm, the speaker weighs two readings of the token and finally orders it buried with him so that some of her goes into the grave.
Poetry · PoemDeath
The speaker defies personified Death as a servant of fate and chance, ending with the paradox that death itself will die.
Poetry · PoemTo the Virgins, to make much of Time
Flowers, the sun’s daily race, and passing age form a countdown toward the poem’s explicit counsel to marry before youth is spent.
Poetry · PoemTo Daffodils
The speaker asks the daffodils to stay until evensong so the two can go together, then turns the address around to say that human lives run out as quickly as the flowers, the summer rain and the morning dew.
Poetry · PoemThe Funeral Rites of the Rose
A rose sickens and dies, and the other flowers wash, mourn, sing a dirge over her and finally wrap her in a linen shroud as in a tomb.
Poetry · PoemA Meditation for his Mistress
Seven stanzas liken the beloved to tulip, gillyflower, rosebud, vine, enclosed balm and violet, each comparison turning on how quickly the thing perishes, and close by telling her she must die, as must the maker of the song.
Poetry · PoemVirtue
Day, rose, and spring are each sentenced to die, while a virtuous soul is imagined to live most fully even as the world burns away.
Poetry · PoemOn Time
Addressing Time as a devourer, the poem urges it to swallow all that is false until it consumes itself, after which eternity, truth, peace and love remain and the soul sits triumphing over Death, Chance and Time.
Poetry · PoemOn His Deceased Wife
The speaker recounts dreaming that his dead wife came back to him veiled and clothed in white, with love and goodness shining in her, and that as she leaned to embrace him he woke and daylight restored his darkness.
Poetry · PoemThe Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers
Watching a child name and play among flowers, the speaker foresees her future power over lovers, asks for terms before her eyes learn to wound, and ends warning her to spare the buds lest Flora nip her in the blossom.
Poetry · PoemAn Epitaph
The epitaph refuses extended praise for a woman who declined courtship in life, sketches her chastity, modesty and daily reckoning with heaven, then concludes that all such praise is too weak and that her being dead says more.
Poetry · PoemJohn Anderson, my Jo
An aged speaker addresses a lifelong companion whose black hair has turned to snow, recalls the hill they climbed together, and looks ahead to tottering down hand in hand and sleeping at its foot.
Poetry · PoemOn the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, 1802
The sonnet recalls Venice as a free maiden city that held the East in fee and wedded the sea, then argues that even the fading shade of what was once great must be mourned.
Poetry · PoemThe Rainbow
The sight of a rainbow makes the speaker's heart leap as it did in childhood and does in manhood, and he asks that it still do so in old age, wishing his days bound each to each by natural piety.
Poetry · PoemDesideria
Surprised by a moment of joy, the speaker turns instinctively to share it with someone buried in the grave, and the return of that knowledge—together with the discovery that he had briefly forgotten—becomes the worst pang except the moment of the loss itself.
Poetry · PoemValedictory Sonnet to the River Duddon
Thinking of the river as something passed away, the speaker corrects himself: the stream still glides and will glide for ever while men must vanish, and he settles for the hope that what our hands leave behind can serve the future and that love, hope and faith make us greater than we know.
Poetry · PoemWe’ll go no more a-roving
The speakers still feel love and brightness, yet accept that the heart, sword, and soul must rest and that their nightly roaming must pause.
Poetry · PoemRemorse
At nightfall a voice commands departure: duty and dereliction guide the addressee back to solitude, then to a sad, silent home of bitter tears and ghostlike shades. The poem says the soul or the world must fade before the addressee can meet peace. Cloud shadows, winds, ocean and whatever moves, toils or grieves all have their appointed sleep, and the addressee shall rest in the grave; yet until the phantoms that house, heath and garden once made dear have fled, remembrance, repentance and deep musings remain bound to the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile.
Poetry · PoemMusic, when Soft Voices die
Music, scent, and rose leaves outlast their immediate forms; the final address imagines love resting upon the thoughts left by someone who is gone.