Elegy Quotes

“Every angel is terrifying.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My Mind was going numb –

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“I am not a finished poem, and I am not the song you’ve turned me into. I am a detached human being, making my way in a world that is constantly trying to push me aside, and you who send me letters and emails and beautiful gifts wouldn’t even recognise me if you saw me walking down the street where I live tomorrow
for I am not a poem.
I am tired and worn out and the eyes you would see would not be painted or inspired
but empty and weary
from drinking too much
at all times
and I am not the life of your party who sings and has glorious words to speak
for I don’t speak much
at all
and my voice is raspy and unsteady from unhealthy living and not much sleep and I only use it when I sing and I always sing too much
or not at all
and never when people are around because they expect poems and symphonies and I am not
a poem
but an elegy
at my best
but unedited and uncut and not a lot of people want to work with me because there’s only so much you can do with an audio take, with the plug-ins and EQs and I was born distorted, disordered, and I’m pretty fine with that,
but others are not.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“The splendors of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works

“but at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Loneliness Ends With Love”
― Al Lerner

“You drank some darkness
and became visible.”
― Tomas Tranströmer, The Half-Finished Heaven

“We pass and leave you lying. No need for rhetoric, for funeral music, for melancholy bugle-calls. No need for tears now, no need for regret.
We took our risk with you; you died and we live. We take your noble gift, salute for the last time those lines of pitiable crosses, those solitary mounds, those unknown graves, and turn to live our lives out as we may.
Which of us were fortunate--who can tell? For you there is silence and cold twilight drooping in awful desolation over those motionless lands. For us sunlight and the sound of women's voices, song and hope and laughter, despair, gaiety, love--life.
Lost terrible silent comrades, we, who might have died, salute you.”
― Richard Aldington, Roads to Glory

“our present tense
was not too late”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once.”
― Sarah Manguso, The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend

“You can either follow your dreams or adjust with your society's expectations... Either way, consequences are uncertain... the path to glory or the boulevard of mediocrity, both lead to the grave... Choose what's worthwhile, for the end is the same.”
― K Hari Kumar

“Here all may see my body lie/ But not my soul, for that can fly!”
― Helme Heine, Seven Wild Pigs

“Elegies are poems dedicated to the dead. The American hillbilly(assuming we can use that word for the white working class) isn't dead; she is just poor.”
― Anthony Harkins, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy

“On the morning of what should have been Amelia Ashley's birthday, the river valley that had once housed High Bridge changed for Joshua Mayhew. For the first time in many years, it seemed beautiful to him. For the first time in many years, it was beautiful.”
― Tara Hudson, Elegy

“There are good fathers and bad fathers, good sons and bad sons, good husbands and bad ones, but great friends are all alike. We choose them and keep them. We aren’t bound to them by anything but love.”
― Sarah Manguso

“The Inevitable Tide by Stewart Stafford

The inevitable tide comes,
To claim every one of us,
Whether sufficient breath of life,
Is inhaled deep or forsaken.

Then let them bend and screech,
Their hearsay and homilies,
To rake the ashes of earthly remains,
In our final resting place.

The person no longer lingers,
Gone to Paradise or Hell,
Purgatory or mere rotting decay,
A ghostly rose bled white on binding soil.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Yet though these ways be lost, thou hast left one,
Which is, immoderate grief that she is gone.
But we may ’scape that sin, yet weep as much;
Our tears are due because we are not such.
Some tears, that knot of friends, her death must cost,
Because the chain is broke, but no link lost.”
― John Donne

“On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
some pious drops the closing eye requires;
even from the tomb the voice of nature cries,
even in our ashes live their wonted fires.”
― Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard

“Bury me standing, bury me
Three times. No one really drops dead from seeing
Your gaunt, flitting shape in the mirror.
Not mirror but grace. Forgive me for covering
My eyes, for cowering under the blanket, for swatting
At you when I passed a flower garden,
When I shut my windows & chased you
From park benches & fruit trees. I didn’t know
There are people I’m not willing to ever let go,
& I won’t. I haven’t.”
― Rosebud Ben-Oni, If This Is the Age We End Discovery

“Each loved one went silently down;

bubbles bursting leaving behind

images they held

to stick on the glass of memory.”
― Dr. Prathap Kamath Elegy

“Did you tell them that you made love to the poet?
Did you tell them that our lovechild is an elegy?”
― Danabelle Gutierrez, & Until The Dreams Come

“Once that Pretty Blossom bloomed,
With pain for few days she breathed,
To eternity she.. then, transformed!

In Paradise now she dwell,
With all she wants well,
Grateful I am to my Mighty Lord.

Very soon;
she bestowed eternity in innocence.
Prevented from the sufferings of tricky world,
Without enlightening another wish within me.”
― Tehreem Rahat

“How the time passed away, slipped into nightfall as if it had never been!”
― "The Wanderer" Poet

“For me elegy
is a Ouija planchette
something I pretend not to touch
as I push it around trying
to make it say
what I want it to say”
― Mark Bibbins, 13th Balloon

“Little idiosyncratic expressions can form
A sense of who one is. Who one was.
One can, hypothetically, be brought back

In the form of an actor

Who gives an after the fact replication
Of text conveyed in a character's voice.
I can no more understand the world as a stage
Of myself, mired as I am,
In this missing.”
― Mary Jo Bang, Elegy

“The Procession by Stewart Stafford

Let the lighthouse of past lives,
With all of the blinding pinnacles,
Guide us through death's brief mists.

Let the homing dirge of the piper,
Move us as sleep climbs upon us,
Spear of Selene cresting the horizon.

Let the dawn chorus sing in tribute,
To winter's carpeted, unspoiled dawn,
Setting forth with a crunching mission.

Let the cavalcade commence,
With all that are smiling and dearest,
Assembling within the celestial glare.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“From sea's wide spring || out flows the tide:
It advances, retreats, || it smashes, crushes.
The lament for Cú Roí || has distressed me;
The cold silencing, of a hard man || full of passion:
I've seldom heard || of greater misfortune.”
― Taliesin, The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain

“Omega Elegeia by Stewart Stafford

This master of words hath no more,
The hand that penned them stilled,
What you read is an epitaph,
The remnant body of work willed.

Honour and cherish this legacy,
As his flesh and bone are dust,
His poetic flame snuffed hither,
His spirit flown, in that, we trust.

His face was familiar to many,
But known to a precious few,
Now 'tis hidden forevermore,
Covertly in plain sight, anew.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“A Krakovian Conversion by Stewart Stafford

Stone columns on my grave;
Gravity no longer tethers me,
Procession for a fallen saviour,
Our charmed lives split apart.

A cuckoo among darkest eagles,
Faustian profiteer's bloody deal,
Became a phoenix dove in flight,
On the road home to my new form.

An unbroken cypher laid to rest,
A muttered debate behind prayers;
Faux Messiah, who saved himself?
Ransoms paid by a bankrupt sage?

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Teardrop Swarm by Stewart Stafford

Entombed by verdant prison bars,
On land where I once held sway,
Drowned in Death's tearful surf,
In which we all get swept away.

Weep at a rock bearing my name,
A vacant space once familiar there,
Lost and lingered in limbo longing,
Planted in pastures, green and fair.

Arch headstones are defiant cliffs,
For Reaper's wrath to crash upon,
A foundling rage's pristine triumph,
In foam white light, multitudes gone.

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford