The Importance of Memories - Anne Bronte's poem teaches a lesson in...
You’re probably familiar with the works of Charlotte and Emily Bronte; but what you may not know is that they had a younger sister, Anne, who was also a writer. Unfortunately, the successes of her...
View ArticlePassing the Torch: Governmental Control of Life and Death - Kurt Vonnegut Jr....
On the surface, 2BRO2B is an incredibly dark satire portraying a bleak future where death is militantly maintained by the government. As we are introduced to a futuristic society in which death and...
View ArticleThe Empty Mirror and the Rainbow-Bird - Elizabeth Bishop's images in "Sonnet"...
Is the end of life best imagined as a climactic release? Although not explicitly about death, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Sonnet” all but dramatizes it as a swift vault from captivity to liberation as the...
View ArticleThe Hour of Lead - Emily Dickinson perfectly captures the numbness we...
My post last week was about letting go of sorrows in order to be happy, and to fully appreciate the good experiences in life. While this is an important stage to come to, it’s certainly not what...
View ArticleDeath Is the Mother of Beauty - Wallace Stevens's famous declaration from...
In a recent interview with SevenPonds, Terri Daniel encourages us to imagine death as catalyst for new growth, new perspective, new knowledge, or whatever an individual accepts as a gift buried in a...
View ArticleThe Unadulterated Importance of Proper Funeral Etiquette - Mark Twain offers...
For some, death has a unique way of not only modifying your perspective of a person but also altering your understanding of your own relationship with him or her. You may find that suddenly, after...
View ArticleReading Death Between the Lines - William Wordsworth captures grief over a...
How many lines does a poet need to record a loved one’s end of life? Of course the story of a person’s death, as with his or her life, goes farther than any number of words can express. British...
View ArticleWhat Good Comes from Death? - Alexander Alexandrovich Blok shares his own...
If you’ve ever experienced the grief of having lost a loved one after weeks, months or even years of suffering, chances are that you are no stranger to the commonly spoken phrase “at least they are no...
View ArticleA Daughter Mourning a Father She Lost At a Young Age - Sylvia Plath’s famous...
Mourning the loss of a father, regardless of the status of a child’s relationship to him, is never easy. One of my absolute favorite poets, Sylvia Plath, wrote a poem called “Daddy” in 1962 shortly...
View Article“The Truth About Pretty Girls” by Karin Slaughter - Karin Slaughter explores...
“The Truth About Pretty Girls” is a salty and bitter story about how anger and grief can rule over the heart, even decades after someone has passed. Slaughter’s story comes to us as an audiobook...
View Article“But You Didn’t” by Merrill Glass - Merrill Glass’s poem about losing her...
The death of a lover is difficult regardless of whether it is expected, as is the case with long-term illnesses, or if it is sudden, as is the case with a car crash or a major heart attack. The...
View Article“Spikes” by Michael Chabon - Michael Chabon’s “Spikes” offers readers a...
The process of grieving is a healing pain that can revitalize the spirit, just as much as it can signal the end of something or someone that we are beholden by. This is the main lesson for the short...
View ArticleA Fine Line Between Acute and Complicated Grief - Andrea Hollander Budy’s...
When you lose someone beloved to you, the earth can feel like it shatters into a million shards of glass, while time and life also stands frozen. Grief crashes over you like choppy waves. One minute,...
View Article“Condolence” by Dorothy Parker - Dissecting the strange ways that mourning...
Brief and charming and full of a spectacular wit, Dorothy Parker’s “Condolence” is the the kind of poem that you would bring to a funeral or memorial service that is acting as as a life-celebration...
View Article“Death is Nothing at All” by Canon Henry Scott-Holland - Canon Henry...
If life is just a game that we play, then death is one of the greatest game-changers there is. Like all the great milestones in life, from getting married to having children, death is a change that is...
View Article“Death” by Rainer Maria Rilke - Rilke’s beautiful funeral poem perfectly...
For many of us, the busyness of our daily lives often leads to us taking our lives for granted. When someone we loved dearly dies, our grief and sorrow for his or her absence tends to trigger an urge...
View Article“Last Words” by Sylvia Plath - Sylvia Plath's funeral poem imagines what her...
Sylvia Plath was both haunted and mesmerized by death. Suffering from depression at an early age, Plath’s poetry deeply encapsulates how she felt about dying. Her depression often evaporated her fear...
View Article“On the Death of Anne Brontë” by Charlotte Brontë - Charlotte Brontë’s...
Charlotte Brontë’s tribute poem to the loss of her baby sister, Anne, serves as an example of the reflections that occur in a grieving person’s mind when they lose someone for whom they deeply loved...
View ArticleGrief as a Gateway to the Divine - James Merrill explores the divine that is...
James Merrill’s elegiac poem, “A Dedication” observes grief in its most intimate setting: the mind. Addressed to his friend, the Dutch poet Hans Lodeizen (who died while still a young man in 1950), the...
View Article“Peace” by Langston Hughes - Hughes’ funeral poem reflects on the futile...
War and its consequences wreak havoc on countless lives with its numerous casualties — whether they are civilian members or the soldiers involved on either side. In his poem, “Peace,” one of my...
View Article
