"The Death-Bed" (A Poem)

Written sometime between 1821 and 1845, Thomas Hood’s “The Death-Bed” showcases the varied Victorian sentiments toward death. For some, such as Percy Russell and Seba Smith, death was a gruesome process made even more frightening by the potential for premature burial. For others, Hood among them, death, as Alison Milbank highlights, became an extension of life which Victorians uncomfortably handled by perceiving it as a passage or – as in the case of Hood’s poem – a perpetual sleep.[1] 

We watch'd her breathing through the night,
Her breathing soft and low,
As in her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro.

So silently we seem'd to speak,
So slowly moved about,
As we had lent her half our powers
To eke her living out.

Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied –
We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died.

For when the morn came dim and sad,
And chill with early showers,
Her quiet eyelids closed – she had
Another morn than ours.[2]

Works Referenced

Hood, Thomas. “The Death-Bed.” The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hood. Ed. Walter Jerrold. New York: Oxford University Press, 1911. 444.

Milbank, Alison. God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
____________________
[1] Milbank, 209.
[2] Hood, 444.