funeral poetry

The modern funeral is a grief-bypass procedure?

20 May 2016
Charles
14 Comments
Categories: Formality vs informality, funeral, funeral music, funeral poetry, Religious funerals

Stewart Dakers is a 76 year-old voluntary community worker with a weekly column in the Guardian. He wrote a piece in last week’s Spectator about funerals. Here’s a taster:

Funerals ain’t what they used to be. Today’s emphasis is more on celebrating a life past than honouring the future of a soul. While I am not averse to a celebratory element, the funeral is morphing into a spiritually weightless bless-fest. This was brought home to me last week at the funeral of Enid, a lady I knew only through our mutual attendance at bingo in the community centre.

I was uncomfortable from the moment we gathered outside the church, where my sombre suit set me apart from the Technicolor crowd of family and friends. The atmosphere was more akin to a wedding, even a hen do, than a funeral, the air drenched in perfume and aftershave. Inside, there was pew-to-pew chatter, wall-to-wall music (Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’, inevitably), not a single moment of silence, and not a single sacred song, let alone a prayer (an inaccurately mumbled Lord’s Prayer excepted). There were two readings, one by a grand-niece of perhaps eight, snivelling, bless, a poem about being only next door; then a nephew offering a eulogy, the main point of which was that his aunt had been a keen gardener ‘and she will plant her flowers in heaven’.

I know I shouldn’t sneer. Religion, the Anglican version anyhow, is a broad church with a wide liturgical spectrum. But I could not help feeling that such celebration missed the point. It somehow connected with a virtual life rather than a real death. It was spiritual displacement activity.

You can read the rest of the article by clicking here.

Portrait of a deaf man

5 August 2014
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, cemeteries, funeral poetry, Grief

Posted by Vale

I was listening to a programme about the recordings John Betjeman made with Jim Parker, setting his verse to some glorious music.

Until they played this, though, I’d forgotten how dark Betjeman could be.

On A Portrait Of A Deaf Man

The kind old face, the egg-shaped head,
The tie, discretely loud,
The loosely fitting shooting clothes,
A closely fitting shroud.

He liked old city dining rooms,
Potatoes in their skin,
But now his mouth is wide to let
The London clay come in.

He took me on long silent walks
In country lanes when young.
He knew the names of ev’ry bird
But not the song it sung.

And when he could not hear me speak
He smiled and looked so wise
That now I do not like to think
Of maggots in his eyes.

He liked the rain-washed Cornish air
And smell of ploughed-up soil,
He liked a landscape big and bare
And painted it in oil.

But least of all he liked that place
Which hangs on Highgate Hill
Of soaked Carrara-covered earth
For Londoners to fill.

He would have liked to say goodbye,
Shake hands with many friends,
In Highgate now his finger-bones
Stick through his finger-ends.

You, God, who treat him thus and thus,
Say “Save his soul and pray.”
You ask me to believe You and
I only see decay.

This, I realise is number three in my very occasional series of tributes to fathers – the ‘Old Deaf Man – is certainly Betjemn senior. See numbers 1 (Horace Silver) and 2 (Astor Piazolla) here and here.

Bespoke poems as funeral eulogies

16 July 2013
Charles
18 Comments
Categories: funeral poetry

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Poems are often read at funerals.

Here are just a few, including WH Auden’s Funeral Blues, which moved many cinema-goers to tears when featured in Four Weddings… ‘He was my North, my South, my East and West/My working week and my Sunday rest…’

But are many celebrants confident enough in their word skills to craft a bespoke poem based on their understanding of a person’s character traits and unique story?

Helen Bennett advertises this service on her website. ‘There are many wonderful eulogy poems out there that are for general use, but for many people they can seem overused, impersonal and inappropriate,’ she says. ‘If you want something that really is very personal… then I can help you’.

It’s a shame she doesn’t post a few examples of her work to give us a flavour.

Above is The Dead by former US poet laureate Billy Collins. It doesn’t take the form of a eulogy about a specific person, but it evokes a soothing image of the after-life and comes with an animation for the YouTube generation.

And here’s my attempt at a sonnet of iambic pentameter, again unspecific, and more concerned about rhyming than moving.

We do not know

We do not know when or how we shall die.
Will we even have time to say goodbye?
A deadly disease or quick accident,
In peaceful sleep or by something violent?

We do not know where we go at the end.
Heaven, Hell, Nowhere, or does it depend?
How do we prepare for this great mystery,
What acts and beliefs define our history?

We do not know why we love or hate so
Until we acknowledge it all has to go.
Life matters more because Death’s at the door,
Merging as one with eternity’s law.

We do not know when or how we shall die,
May God give us grace for our final sigh.

Love, death and much, much verse

2 August 2012
Charles
No comments
Categories: funeral poetry, Poetry

The Purbeck Isle

What do love and death have in common? Ans: they inspire poetry. It’s where we turn when words fail.

Two pieces today. The first is freshly minted by our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson.

We do not know

We do not know when or how we shall die.
Will we even have time to say goodbye?
A deadly disease or quick accident,
In peaceful sleep or by something violent? 

We do not know where we go at the end.
Heaven, Hell, Nowhere, or does it depend?
How do we prepare for this great mystery,
What acts and beliefs define our history? 

We do not know why we love or hate so
Until we acknowledge it all has to go.
Life matters more because Death’s at the door,
Merging as one with eternity’s law. 

We do not know when or how we shall die,
May God gives us grace for our final sigh.

The second is by Jim Dolbear, was published in the Free Portland News in July and commemorates the loss with all hands of the Purbeck Isle off Portland Bill in May.

Souls of the Sea

The Purbeck Isle set sail that day
To trawl whelk, haul crabs along the way
Skipper Dave, Robert, and young Jack,
On the same day, they would be back.
Twilight came, there’s no sight, no sound,
The search now on ’til they are found.
Alas the rescue not to be,
Three more souls lost to the sea.
Now bairns alas will only see,
Pictures of dad when on mum’s knee.
A widow for her son will weep,
As angels their vigil now keep.
No husband, dad, son to hold,
We bow our heads when the bells tolled.
And pray for safety there will be,
For those that fish upon the sea.

The house is not the same since you left

13 April 2012
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: funeral poetry, Poetry

Posted by celebrant Evelyn Temple

 

THE HOUSE IS NOT THE SAME SINCE YOU LEFT

BY HENRY NORMAL

 

The house is not the same since you left

The cooker is angry – it blames me

The TV tries desperately to stay busy

But occasionally I catch it staring out of the window

The washing-up’s feeling sorry for itself again

It just sits there saying “What’s the point, what’s the point?

The curtains count the days

Nothing in the house will talk to me

I think your armchair’s dead

The kettle tried to comfort me at first

But you know what its attention span is like

I’ve not told the plants yet

They think you’re still on holiday

The bathroom misses you

I hardly see it these days

It still can’t believe you didn’t take it with you

The bedroom won’t even look at me

Since you left it, it keeps its eyes closed

All it wants to do is sleep

Remembering better times

Trying to lose itself in dreams

It seems like it’s taken the easy way out

But at night

I hear the pillows weeping into the sheets.

 

 

 

A bird’s-eye view: Jack’s funeral

15 March 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: funeral, funeral directors, funeral music, funeral poetry

 Posted by Juno Gatsby

Jack’s granddaughter called me and asked if I could recommend a venue for his funeral service. His family knew he didn’t want his last journey to be in a church or crematorium. He would be laid to rest in their local cemetery after his farewell ceremony. We talked about hotels and wedding venues but most hotels aren’t too keen on having a hearse parked outside the main entrance! They tried the local Register Office as a potential venue, they were very kind and helpful but…..there were just too many corners to be negotiated. It would be impossible to manoeuvre a coffin into the building with any dignity. Then we hit on the idea of wedding barn venues, and the family got busy on the phone and sorted it all out for themselves. The owners of a beautiful, mellow stone-walled, old oak-beamed barn conversion agreed in principle – as long as there were no legal restrictions. We reassured them that, unlike weddings, there are no legal restrictions on where and when you can hold a funeral ceremony.

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Jazz requiem

12 January 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death, bereavement, funeral music, funeral poetry

Posted by Vale

This lovely jazz piece was actually a requiem for Charlie Parker – but at risk of offending purists I thought Frank O’Hara’s poem for Billie Holiday on the day she died fitted perfectly with the music.

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Perfection Wasted

16 December 2011
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: funeral poetry

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market—
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response to your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

John Updike

 

RIP Hitch. UR a legend. 

There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so

11 March 2011
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: funeral poetry

I don’t know where you stand on literary criticism. I’ve never been a fan, largely because I don’t understand it. Many years ago I taught for a while, and I was charged with showing fifteen year-olds how to back-seat drive Shakespeare and other quite good writers. Despairing of my teaching methods, my students would resort to buying exam cribs so that they could teach themselves. They would come to class wanting to test me about themes and symbolism and other stuff that left me standing with my mouth open. They all did pretty well in their exams, though. The best things we learn at school are the things we find out for ourselves. Very bad teachers are especially inspiring in this respect. I ought to say inspirational, but I won’t.

I was much keener on literary celebration. I encouraged my students to clap and whoop when they encountered something they really liked – a great idea, a well-turned phrase, some yummy assonance. I hope they retained something of this spirit.

The critical faculty can go both ways. Lit crit teaches us what’s good and why. It teaches us taste. It teaches us to be discriminating. And here comes the downside: it teaches us to discriminate against. One measure of cleverness is its ability to demonstrate that something lots of people think is really rather good is, in actual fact, complete crap. I’ve always preferred open-eyed wonderment to narrow-eyed appraisal. I’m not saying I’m right. But I do think that schools teach clever kids to sneer.

If you take a lit crit yardstick to most of the poetry declaimed at funerals you’ll agree that most of it falls short of the highest rank. Try as they may to interest their clients in summat a bit posh, celebrants find it all but impossible to stop them from going downmarket, pouncing on some Poundland stuff about stairways to heaven and how God only takes the best, then asking the celebrant to read it. As practical jokes go, this is a pretty good one to play on an educated person.

Does the literary quality of funerals matter? Of course not. The only thing that matters is the testimony of hurting hearts (Tony Piper’s phrase). Celebrants can attach far too much value to a well-wrought script.

The iniquity of literary snobbery is well exposed by the poem young Ryan Mayes wrote for his murdered girlfriend Nikitta Grender:

 

My love for you runs so deep, it is hard for me to sleep.

I miss you both so much and I know all our plans and hopes are now in my dreams.

I never thought the Lord would take you both away from me so soon.

Just a thought of you makes me cry, I never had a chance to say goodbye.

I always smell your scent, it makes me think of all the times we’ve spent.

So many things I never got to say Babe, the day God took you a part of me died too.

But now I have to let you rest although my world’s a mess.

I miss you both and will love you ‘til the day I die.

Your heartbroken boyfriend Ryan XXX.

Account of the funeral here. Don’t miss the family member with the pink hair.