Quotes About Elegy

Look down fair moon and bathe this scene, Pour softly down night's nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple, On the dead on their backs with arms toss'd wide, Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon. —Walt Whitman Sequel to Drum-Taps

They tell me, Lucy, thou art dead, that all of thee we loved and cherished has with thy summer roses perished; and left, as its young beauty fled, an ashen memory in its stead.

I had no business trying to see you leave, see death arrive, I owe you an apology, an elegy, I owe you the drift of memory, the praise of everything, of saying it was the best decision of my life, to hold you full, hold you empty, & live as the only bond between the two.

Yo soy como el ave cisne, que canta cuando se muere

When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.

I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin.

Mourn, ye Graces and Loves, and all you whom the Graces love. My lady's sparrow is dead, the sparrow, my lady's pet.

And I knew you, a swelling in the heart, A silence in the heart, the wild wind-blown grass Burning–as the sun falls below the earth– Brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow. — Brigit Pegeen Kelly, from "Elegy," The Orchard: Poems (BOA Editions Ltd., 2004)

There's something really unnatural about losing a child, and there's something unnatural about having to write an elegy for your child, but I felt that I wanted people to know what he was like.

Long ruddy rays touched the surface of the lake, where black swans haunted the shores, shrouded among rigid spears of reds. The swans sang to the approaching night, and to Khaster, it sounded like a lament for the end of the world.

To think that she had read the same elegiac prose he now beheld with such quiet awe made his heart sing.

Even in death she was more beautiful to him than she ever was alive.

Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell? Whom do you lead on Rapture's roadway far Before you agonize them in farewell?

Grief is fantastical, and loves the dead, And the apparel of the grave.

News of your death. Tears, and the memory of all the times we talked the sun down the sky. You, Herakleitos of Halikarnassos, once my friend, now vacant dust, whose poems are nightingales beyond the clutch of the unseen god.

I am sorry that our friendship, or whatever name one may give to the obsessive relationship which has bound us together for so many years, should end in this way. This is not the place to utter its elegy.

Underneath this stone doth lie As much beauty as could die.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

She was young and lovely and surprised and dead.

Ah what avails the sceptred race, Ah what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee.

E scriverò per te, per il tuo ricordo straziante, pochi versi dolenti che tu non leggerai più. Ma a me staranno atroci, inchiodati nel cuore per sempre.»

He'd make a lovely corpse.

He would make a lovely corpse.

Requiescat Tread lightly, she is near Under the snow, Speak gently, she can hear The daisies grow. All her bright golden hair Tarnished with rust, She that was young and fair Fallen to dust. Lily-like, white as snow, She hardly knew She was a woman, so Sweetly she grew. Coffin-board, heavy stone, Lie on her breast, I vex my heart alone She is at rest. Peace, Peace, she cannot hear Lyre or sonnet, All my life's buried here, Heap earth upon it.