In the face of death, poetry stands as a bulwark against dissolution, chaos, and madness.
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Tag Archives: death and dying
Poetry vs. Death’s Madness
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "How could I have come so far?", "Life Monitor", Cat's Cradle, Charles Dickens, Checkmate, Ciaran O'Driscoll, David Copperfield, Dorothy Dunnett, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom McGrath | Comments closed
A Time for Silence
Silence can be a very powerful response to tragedy.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "I Am the Rest between Two Notes", Bible, Ecclesiastes, Rainer Maria Rilke | Comments closed
Waiting for the Tide to Turn
Dickinson, Coleridge and Dickens come to mind as we await the moment of my father’s death.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "After great pain a formal feeling comes", Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Emily Dickinson, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Comments closed
Moving through Death’s Doorway
My father’s poem about Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” is comforting me as he slides towards death.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Dream of the Little Match Girl in New York", Hans Christian Andersen, Little Match Girl, Scott Bates | Comments closed
Magnificent Women in the Sick Room
Tolstoy shows us deathbed vigils can spur us to a deeper engagement with life.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Do Not Go Gentle", "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", Anna Karenina, Dylan Thomas, George Eliot, John Donne, Leo Tolstoy, Middlemarch | Comments closed
My Father Piped Songs of Pleasant Glee
As I read my dying father poems from Blake’s “Songs of Innocence,” I relived cherished memories.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Scott Bates, Songs of Innocence, William Blake | Comments closed
The Rising Floodwaters of Sadness
My father is dying. One of his last acts was to find an A. A. Milne passage about Sewanee’s incessant rain for the local newspaper.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Castaway", A. A. Milne, William Cowper, Winnie the Pooh | Comments closed
High Bouncing Lover, I Must Have You
Fitzgerald’s epigraph to “Great Gatsby” challenges us to live life to the fullest.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged F. Scott Fitzgerald, Great Gatsy, memorial service | Comments closed
On Loving and Letting Go
Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods” instructs us in how to live and how to die.