Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” captured my son’s sense of connection with his dead brother.
Sign up for my weekly newsletter
Tag Archives: death and dying
A Child’s Connection with the Dead
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "We Are Seven", Children, William Wordsworth | Comments closed
Where Are the Games of Yesteryear?
Christmas I shared “Ballad of the Games of Yesteryear” this past spring when my father temporarily lapsed into dementia. But he wrote it as a Christmas poem and so I’m posting it again as I mourn the first Christmas spent without him. Now that he is dead, the poem contains special meaning, echoing as it […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Ballad of the Ladies of Bygone Times", "Ballad of the Toys of Yesteryear", Christmas, Francois Villon, nostalgie, Scott Bates | Comments closed
For Sontag, Purpose of Lit Was Change
Susan Sontag loved literature because she craved “new blood and new nourishment and new inspiration.”
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Harold Bloom, public intellectuals, Susan Sontag | Comments closed
Our Strands Grow Richer With Each Loss
May Sarton’s beautiful poem “All Souls” reminds us that our dead continue to move through us.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "All Souls", All Souls Day, grieving, May Sarton | Comments closed
My Father Moved through Dooms of Love
At my father’s memorial service, we read poems by e.e. cummings, Shakespeare, Jacques Prévert, and my father himself.
Farewell to the Boy with the Golden Crown
Yesterday at my father’s memorial service I read ones of his poems about the recurrent cycle of life.
The Song of Night’s Sweet Bird
Shelley’s elegy to Keats, “Adonais,” gives us a rich vision of our relationship with death.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Ode to a Nightingale", Adonais, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley | Comments closed
Green Knight’s Lessons on Death & Dying
My next book will be on what “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” teaches us about death and dying.
Carrying on a Poetic Quest after a Death
Now that my father has died, my mother will be taking on sole responsibility for the local newspaper’s poetry column.