Grief is difficult to express in words. Loss washes over the mind, staggering
in its intensity, making articulation impossible. What does one articulate:
emptiness or presence?

Funeral Blues
~ W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone ( Read more... )

In Memory of W.B. Yeats ~ W.H. Auden

I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the ( Read more... )

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the ( Read more... )