A Day of RemembranceOn All Souls Day, a remembrance of those we love and live among us in memory, two poems by John Updike and W.B. Yeats.
I can't get this little Updike poem - one of his last - out of my head and, on this crisp fall day of remembrance, it once again seems particularly appropriate.
It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
"Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise - depths unplumable!"
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
"I thought he died a while ago."
For life's a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge,
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.
- John Updike
from "Endpoint and Other Poems"
And Yeats's - All Souls' Night
Epilogue to “A Vision’ Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell And may a lesser bell sound through the room; And it is All Souls’ Night, And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come; For it is a ghost’s right, His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
The rest of the All Souls' Night is here:
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