The Flowering Corpse by Djuna Barnes
So still she lies in this closed place apart,
Her feet grown fragile for the ghostly tryst;
Her pulse no longer striking in her wrist,
Nor does its echo wander through her heart.
Over the body and the quiet head
Like stately ferns above an austere tomb,
Soft hairs blow; and beneath her armpits bloom
The drowsy passion flowers of the dead.
In A Country Churchyard by Edmund James Blunden
Earth is a quicksand; yon square tower
Would still seem bold,
But its bleak flinty strength each hour
Is losing hold.
Small sound of gasping undertow
In this green bed!
Who shuts the gate will shut it slow,
Here sleep the dead:
Here sleep, or slept; here, chance, they sleep,
Though still this soil
As mad and clammed as shoals acreep
Around them boil.
The earth slips down to the low brown
Moss-eaten wall
Each year, and nettles and grasses drown
Its crumbling crawl.
The dog-rose and ox-daisies on
Time’s tide come twirling,
And bubble and die where Joy is gone –
Sleep well, my darling.
Seldom the sexton with shrewd grin
Near thy grave-cloth,
With withered step and mumble thin
Awakes eve’s moth.
Not a farm boy dares here destroy,
Through red-toothed nettles,
The chiff-chaff’s nest, to strew the shells
Like fallen petals.
The silver-hooded moth upsprings,
The silver hour,
And wanders on with happy wings
By the hush tower,
That reels and whirs, and never drops,
That still is going;
For quicksand not an instant stops
Its deadly flowing.
And is Joy up and dancing there
Where deepening blue
Asks a new star? is that her hair
There freshed with dew?
Here, O the skull of some small wretch,
Some slaughtered jot,
And bones like bits of hated quitch
Recount fate’s plot.
So lies thy skull? This earth, even this
Like quicksand weaves.
Sleep well, my darling, though I kiss
Lime or dead leaves.
Sleep in the flux as on the breast,
In the vortex loll;
In mid simoom, my innocence, rest;
In lightning’s soul
Bower thyself! But, joyous eyes,
The deeps drag dull –
O morning smile and song, so lies
Thy tiny skull?
The Churchyard of Bree by Mary C. Landon
Some say that these are dead,
And some, but dreaming:
But I can tell you nought
Of things unseeming.
The bellows blow down,
The swallows skirl,
The oak leaves in a ragged whirl
Run round to rue a ragged girl
Asleep above the town.
Epigram: Cemetery at Night by Cale Young Rice
Is it ghost-dreams that rise
Up from each grave –
Or only the fire-flies?
Irony by Olga Mishkin
A black, fathomless night,
Myriads of twinkling stars
Looking down upon a graveyard—
A dark, mysterious graveyard,
Cold, uncanny silent.
And many, many fireflies,
Dancing little fireflies,
Flitting in and out among the tombstones,
Tiny sparks of light
Hovering over tombstones,
Cold hard tombstones.
Two young lovers,
Beautiful, happy lovers,
Sitting on a dead slab of stone,
Embracing on a spiteful, scorning stone.
And the stars are merrily winking,
And the glow-worms are joyously twinkling.
A loud devilish laughter,
A derisive, piercing laughter—
The heart is chilled with fear—
An open groove of earth,
A coverless, gaping grave;
A form,
A white, transparent form,
A shimmering, uncertain form!
A pointing, mocking finger—
And laughter!
Will You Step Into My Grave, Sir? by Conrad Aiken
Will you step into my grave, sir? said the digger to the dead:
You will find it quite as restful, sir, as any human bed;
There’ll be lilacs at the head of you and violets at your feet,
In June the grass will cover you; and the snow will be your sheet.
The rain will thrill a song for you, the wind will tell a tale,
The willow roots will wrap your heart and hold and never fail,
And time will soon forget you, and yourself, forgetting time,
Will climb to sun and flash with leaves and fall again and climb.
I will stretch your bones out straightly, and lay you softly down,
And crown the fever of your days with slumber for a crown.
And none shall come to trouble you, and none shall call your name—
You shall not start at sound of love, nor stir at sound of blame…
Will you step into my grave, sir? said the digger to the dead—
It is more soft and quiet, far, than any human bed…
There’ll be oak trees at the head of you, and willows at the feet,
The blackbirds will sing for you, the snow will be your sheet.
The Grave-Digger by John Bannister Tabb
Here underneath the sod,
Where night till now hath been,
With every lifted clod
I let the sunshine in.
How dark soe’er the gloom
Of Death’s approaching shade,
The first within the tomb
Is light, that cannot fade.
And from the deepest grave
I banish it in vain;
For, like a tidal wave,
Anon ‘twill come again.
To The Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window by Adelaide Crapsey
How can you lie so still? All day I watch
And never a blade of all the green sod moves
To show where restlessly you toss and turn,
And fling a desperate arm or draw up knees
Stiffened and aching from their long disuse;
I watch all night and not one ghost comes forth
To take its freedom of the midnight hour.
Oh, have you no rebellion in your bones?
The very worms must scorn you where you lie,
A pallid mouldering acquiescent folk,
Meek habitants of unresented graves.
Why are you there in your straight row on row
Where I must ever see you from my bed
That in your mere dumb presence iterate
The text so weary in my ears: “Lie still
And rest; be patient and lie still and rest.”
I’ll not be patient! I will not lie still!
There is a brown road runs between the pines,
And further on the purple woodlands lie,
And still beyond blue mountains lift and loom;
And I would walk the road and I would be
Deep in the wooded shade and I would reach
The windy mountain tops that touch the clouds.
My eyes may follow but my feet are held.
Recumbent as you others must I too
Submit? Be mimic of your movelessness
With pillow and counterpane for stone and sod?
And if the many sayings of the wise
Teach of submission I will not submit
But with a spirit all unreconciled
Flash an unquenched defiance to the stars.
Better it is to walk, to run, to dance,
Better it is to laugh and leap and sing,
To know the open skies of dawn and night,
To move untrammeled down the flaming noon,
And I will clamour it through weary days
Keeping the edge of deprivation sharp,
Nor with the pliant speaking on my lips
Of resignation, sister to defeat.
I’ll not be patient. I will not lie still.
And in ironic quietude who is
The despot of our days and lord of dust
Needs but, scarce heeding, wait to drop
Grim casual comment on rebellion’s end;
“Yes, yes . . Wilful and petulant but now
As dead and quiet as the others are.”
And this each body and ghost of you hath heard
That in your graves do therefore lie so still.
Moonlight Churchyard by David Macbeth Moir
To die and go we know not whither,
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot.
-Shakespeare
Round thee, pure Moon, a ring of snowy clouds
Hover, like children round their mother dear
In silence and in joy, for ever near
The footsteps of her love. Within their shrouds,
Lonely, the slumbering dead encompass me!
Thy silver beams the mouldering abbey flout;
Black rails, memorial stones, are strew’d about;
And the leaves rustle on the holly tree.
Shadows mark out the undulating graves;
Tranquilly, tranquilly the departed lie!—
Time is an ocean, and mankind the waves
That reach the dim shores of Eternity;
Death strikes; and Silence, ‘mid the evening gloom,
Sits spectre-like, the guardian of the tomb!
The Stranger by Walter De la Mare
Half-hidden in a graveyard,
In the blackness of a yew,
Where never living creature stirs,
Nor sunbeam pierces through,
Is a tombstone green and crooked,
Its faded legend gone,
And but one rain-worn cherub’s head
To sing of the unknown.
There, when the dusk is falling,
Silence broods so deep
It seems that every wind that breathes
Blows from the fields of sleep.
Day breaks in heedless beauty,
Kindling each drop of dew,
But unforsaking shadow dwells
Beneath this lonely yew.
And, all else lost and faded,
Only this listening head
Keeps with a strange unanswering smile
Its secret with the dead.
Darkling, I Listen 