2 Comments

  1. Anthony D.

    I’ve always appreciated what Walt Whitman, the highly acclaimed American poet, had to say about death in Song of Myself:

    ‘I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
    and women,
    And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
    taken soon out of their laps.
    What do you think has become of the young and old men?
    And what do you think has become of the women and
    children?

    They are alive and well somewhere,
    The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
    And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
    at the end to arrest it,
    And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

    All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
    And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
    luckier.’

    That last line always gets me.

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