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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 3. TO ONE DEAD, by EDWARD CARPENTER Poet's Biography First Line: You must look at your own body lying dead there quiet calmly Last Line: And even so it is only one of your similitudes. Subject(s): Death; Dead, The | |||
YOU must look at your own body lying dead there quite calmly— [If you have ever loved and quietly surrendered that love you will understand what I mean]— The dear fingers and feet, the eyes you have looked in so often—they are yours no longer; You are not bound to them, you are something else than you thought. Now you see that these things are only a similitude: A new and wonderful life opens out—so wonderful, O so wonderful! Those eyes whose answer once you forebore to ask for—do you remember how after all, how wide and wonderful at last they opened upon you, shining up for you (yes for you) from depths you saw not in them before? And that body which now you have forsaken, so now for the first time do you understand it and its life (all the old passages in it so clear, so real, so wonderful, so transparent); Now it radiates back upon you what you are—of whom it is only the similitude; And even so it is only one of your similitudes. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A FRIEND KILLED IN THE WAR by ANTHONY HECHT FOR JAMES MERRILL: AN ADIEU by ANTHONY HECHT TARANTULA: OR THE DANCE OF DEATH by ANTHONY HECHT CHAMPS D?ÇÖHONNEUR by ERNEST HEMINGWAY NOTE TO REALITY by TONY HOAGLAND AS A MOULD FOR SOME FAIR FORM by EDWARD CARPENTER |
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