"Dirge" (A Poem)

Hearkening back to the epicedium (songs sung over the body of the deceased) of ancient Greece, the dirge is a poem or song similar to an elegy meant to commemorate the dead and, in the tradition of American literature, has a long history of appearing in the works of writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kenneth Fearing, Heather McHugh, Herman Melville, Thomas Merton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman, and David Wojahn.[1] Composed sometime between 1825 and 1844, Thomas Lovell Beddoes' "Dirge" is just one example of the genre.

We do lie beneath the grass
In the moonlight, in the shade
Of the yew-tree. They that pass
Hear us not. We are afraid
They would envy our delight,
In our graves by glow-worm night.
Come follow us, and smile as we;
We sail to the rock in the ancient waves,
Where the snow falls by thousands into the sea,
And the drowned and the shipwrecked have happy graves.[2]

Works Referenced

Boddoes, Thomas Lovell. "Dirge." The Poems Posthumous and Collected of Thomas Lovell Boddoes. Vol. 2. London: William Pickering, 1851. 163.

Hirsch, Edward. A Poet’s Glossary. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.
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[1] Hirsch, 166-167.
[2] Beddoes, 163.