Tag Archives: Poetry



”Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I have a call.”

- Sylvia Plath

Read the entire poem, “Lady Lazarus”, here. More in “A Rite of Passage”: 

Memorial Music: “Kettering” by The Antlers “If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a … Continue reading

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“The Man with Night Sweats” by Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn memorializes his loved ones who died of AIDS

Thom Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats (1992) memorializes a San Francisco poet’s tragic losses due to AIDS. An “Anglo-American poet” known for his brainy yet visceral formal verse, the late British expatriate often wrote in meter and rhyme about his … Continue reading

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“Dirge Without Music” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay expresses her struggle to accept mortality in her poem “Dirge Without Music”

Edna St. Vincent Millay is no stranger to us at SevenPonds. While death remains a constant theme in many of her poems, her relationship with death oscillates between acceptance and repulsion—making her treatment of the subject utterly relatable. A woman … Continue reading

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“Christmas Tree” by James Merrill

James Merrill writes on his own end of life through the perspective of a Christmas tree

Wound in lights, heavy with ornaments and heirlooms, photos of children now grown up or parents no longer here, the Christmas tree brightens the living room. It fills the floor with needles and scents the air with pine. Becomes a … Continue reading

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“The Drowned Brother” by Brendan Constantine

Brendan Constantine looks at how bureaucracy helps us cope with loss in "The Drowned Brother"

“The Drowned Brother” is a eulogy-like poem that explores the revelation of the death of a brother in Brendan Constantine’s latest poetic novel “Calamity Joe”. In the poem, the narrator Calamity Joe relates the impersonal actions of the police and … Continue reading

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“Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson's poem offers a peaceful look at death

I’ve been looking a lot at writers’ views on death itself lately, but not as much at what happens after death. Emily Dickinson offers her take on the afterlife in “Because I could not stop for Death,” arguably her most … Continue reading

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