Love of its muted music breathes no sigh,
Thought in her ivory tower gropes in her spinning,
Toss on in vain the whispering trees of Eden,
Last of all words spoken is, Good-bye.
Walter De la Mare
[De la Mare approached death with great serenity. "My days are getting shorter," he told Joyce Grenfell. "But there is more and more magic. More than in all poetry. Everything is increasingly wonderful and beautiful." On June 20th 1956 he wrote to a friend about the midsummer leaf and blossom: "One looks at it partly with amazed delight and partly with anticipatory regret at its transitoriness." The next night, at 2am, the nurse asked if he was comfortable. "Yes, I'm perfectly all right," he replied - then he caught his last breath, gasped and died.]
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes...
And yet I am, and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And een the dearest - that I loved the best -
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.
John Clare
["If life had a second edition," wrote Clare, "how I would correct the proofs." He spent the last 22 years of his life in a lunatic asylum in Northampton, forsaken by his former friends and family.]
(Why? Because I fear I know the answer to above question... yet in truth nobody knows. We think we're following in the footsteps of those that went before, but no two paths are identical - even if the feet fall together, the view from inside out can never be recaptured within a later lifetime. We're on our own. Quite, quite alone. (Living before) death: the final frontier.)
Notes from: Albery, N. (1994) (ed) Poem for the Day London: The Natural Death Centre
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