Men’s Words and Thoughts on Death! One will deny His and his dead body’s identity; Yet resent, as if slight to his own worth, Its rotting when deposited in earth; Flame’s outrage, devouring it with his goods; Beasts’, tearing it to pieces in the woods. His proud profession that he does not care For his body’s plight—He will not be there— Rings false; he keeps, secreted in his heart, A nerve which aches, though flesh and feeling part. Not will self be root and branch so wrenched out As that some still shall not be left about; For why contemplate else at all the lot Of the dead flesh he says concerns him not, Unless Self pities Self, and it hurts the Soul That it and flesh make an ill-smelling whole? But, if strange that the sufferer thus made To stand by, share the cruel insult paid The carcase, being flesh and spirit, one, Though feigned to feel, by now is past and gone, And as Nothingness cannot feel it ill For brutes to maul it, is not stranger still The impulse rather to exult than mourn When men foresee they shall hereafter burn Upon a grand funeral pyre, or lie Mummies, stifled, frozen, alternately, On polished slabs of marble, or be hid, Crushed beneath a mountainous pyramid! You grieve: “No more will echoes of your feet Reach home; no wife and children run to greet Your glad return, and vie for the first kiss, Flooding a heart, too full for speech, with bliss; No more for dear ones will you watch and store; Be their armour, and citadel no more;— Oh! that one day, cruel, accursed, should spoil, The harvesting of a whole lifetime’s toil!” But in these sighs, what cause will you have shown For real tribulation of your own? Rather will not the death that you bewail Be happy ending of a fairy tale? Reduce your cries to words; and they will clear Away a grievance, and assuage a fear. To fall asleep at a fair life’s fair close, And thence till Time shall cease enjoy repose— Where hardship? If it be to leave behind Boundless sorrow to kindred, ease your mind; The ash-pale face on the funeral pile, Far from forbidding kindly souls to smile, Stands for rest rewarding labour, release From accidents of fortune’s blind caprice! Folly again, when banqueters recline, Brows roses-wreathed, cups in their hands, the wine At their hearts, and—“brief harvest this of joy For us poor things”, they cry; “the hour employ! What is is ours; for use; not to recall!” As if of death’s ills, if any, of all Chief were to think of feasting in the past, Feel in the hand the wine cup, and not taste!