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Obituary poetry, in the broad sense, includes poems or elegies that commemorate a person's or group of people's deaths. In its stricter sense, though, it refers to a genre of popular verse or folk poetry that had its greatest popularity in the nineteenth century, especially in the United States of America .
The first line of the poem, "I heard a fly buzz– when I died–" is intended to garner the attention of the reader. [4] Readers are said to be drawn to continue the poem, curious as to how the speaker is talking about her own death. [4] The narrator then reflects on the moments prior to the very moment she died. [1]
Death is a gentleman who is riding in the horse carriage that picks up the speaker in the poem and takes the speaker on her journey to the afterlife. According to Thomas H. Johnson's variorum edition of 1955 the number of this poem is "712". The poet's persona speaks about Death and Afterlife, the peace that comes along with it without haste.
The next earliest example is by an anonymous author, probably of the 1st century BCE, lamenting the death of Bion; this poem has sometimes been attributed to the Hellenistic poet Moschus. [8] Virgil's "Eclogue 5," written in the 1st century BCE, is the most imitated ancient model of the pastoral elegy.
It is a scene of desolation and despair. The wind moans in a grief that cannot be expressed in words; the rain storm billows in vain; the trees are barren and their branches strain under the unceasing onslaught. A gloom pervades the world. A dirge is a song meant to invoke and express the emotions of grief and mourning that are typical of a ...
Kansas native Clare Harner (1909–1977) first published "Immortality" in the December 1934 issue of poetry magazine The Gypsy [1] and was reprinted in their February 1935 issue. It was written shortly after the sudden death of her brother. Harner's poem quickly gained traction as a eulogy and was read at funerals in Kansas and Missouri.
The poem discusses proper decorum in the wake of the death of a young woman, described as "the queenliest dead that ever died so young". The poem concludes: "No dirge shall I upraise,/ But waft the angel on her flight with a paean of old days!" Lenore's fiancé, Guy de Vere, finds it inappropriate to "mourn" the dead; rather, one should ...
Jan Kochanowski with his dead daughter in a painting by Jan Matejko inspired by the poet's Threnodies. A threnody is a wailing ode, song, hymn or poem of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person.