(1) a great man
there was a great man
so great he couldn’t be criticised in the light
who died
and for a whole week people turned up their collars over their ears
and wept with great gossiping
houses wore their roofs at a mournful angle
and television announcers carried their eyes around in long drooping bags
there was a hush upon the [...]

A bullet through his heart at dawn. On
the table a letter signed
with a woman’s name. A wind that goes howling round the
house,
and weeping as in shame. Cold November dawn peeping through
the windows,
cold dawn creeping over the floor, creeping up his cold legs,
creeping over his cold body, creeping across his cold face.
A glaze of thin yellow [...]

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail [...]

The day is ending,
The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.
Through clouds like ashes
The red sun flashes
On village windows
That glimmer red.
The snow recommences;
The buried fences
Mark no longer
The road o’er the plain;
While through the meadows,
Like fearful shadows,
Slowly passes
A funeral train.
The bell is pealing,
And every feeling
Within me responds
To the dismal knell;
Shadows are trailing,
My heart is bewailing
And [...]

The opening scene. The yellow, coal-fed fog
Uncurling over the tainted city river,
A young girl rowing and her anxious father
Scavenging for corpses. Funeral meats. The clever
Abandoned orphan. The great athletic killer
Sulking in his tent. As though all stories began
With someone dying.
When her mother died,
My mother refused to attend the funeral–
In fact, she sulked in her tent [...]

“Yes,” said the sister with the little pinched face,
The busy little sister with the funny little tract: —
“This is the climax, the grand fifth act.
There rides the proud, at the finish of his race.
There goes the hearse, the mourners cry,
The respectable hearse goes slowly by.
The wife of the dead has money in her purse,
The children [...]

I
Partly to think, more to be left alone,
George Annandale said something to his friends—
A word or two, brusque, but yet smoothed enough
To suit their funeral gaze—and went upstairs;
And there, in the one room that he could call
His own, he found a sort of meaningless
Annoyance in the mute familiar things
That filled it; for the grate’s monotonous [...]

Through airy roads he wings his instant flight
To purer regions of celestial light;
Enlarg’d he sees unnumber’d systems roll,
Beneath him sees the universal whole,
Planets on planets run their destin’d round,
And circling wonders fill the vast profound.
Th’ ethereal now, and now th’ empyreal skies
With growing splendors strike his wond’ring eyes:
The angels view him with delight unknown,
Press his [...]

1
TO think of time—of all that retrospection!
To think of to-day, and the ages continued henceforward!
Have you guess’d you yourself would not continue?
Have you dreaded these earth-beetles?
Have you fear’d the future would be nothing to you?
Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing?
If the future is nothing, they are just as surely nothing.
To think that the [...]

Night funeral
In Harlem:
Where did they get
Them two fine cars?
Insurance man, he did not pay–
His insurance lapsed the other day–
Yet they got a satin box
for his head to lay.
Night funeral
In Harlem:
Who was it sent
That wreath of flowers?
Them flowers came
from that poor boy’s friends–
They’ll want flowers, too,
When they meet their ends.
Night funeral
in Harlem:
Who preached that
Black boy to [...]