Poems on Death 

       “Don’t bargain.
Just grab the swishing tail
of your nerve’s latest adventure
and go with the inevitable tide.“

Dorothy Porter  The Sea Hare

Blaise Pascal wrote that what makes humans distinct is that we know we are attached to a dying animal, and that the universe knows nothing of this. Our knowledge of death, our awareness of our mortality is so fundamental to our human experience.

This study looks at the ways poets have written about death, taking up different responses to the theme in a variety of poems, reading works that face – unstintingly at times, but also tenderly and deeply – the universal yet oft avoided fact of our mortality.

My idea for this salon is that we come to it with an open curiosity about the ways that poets have thought poetically about death.

Starting with Milton’s pastoral elegy Lycidas we go on a journey to the underworld with Rilke’s Orpheus, and through the surreal musings of Neruda and deep existential fear explored in Larkin’s Aubade. Studying eleven poems over four meetings we will finish with poems that contemplate our own mortality, in Dorothy Porter ‘s The Sea Hare and in a selection of haiku known as death poems, written by Japanese poets as their last words of goodbye.

Meeting One
Lycidas, John Milton
The Funeral of Sarpedon, Constantine Cavafy
Sylvia’s Death, Anne Sexton

Meeting Two
Orpheus, Euridice and Hermes, Rainer Maria Rilke
Lenox Hill, Agaha Shahid Ali ­

Meeting Three
Aubade, Philip Larkin
Nothing but Death, Pablo Neruda
To Whoever is Reading Me, Jorge Luis Borges

Meeting Four
The Sea Hare, Dorothy Porter
Japanese Death Poems
In Praise of Dreams, Wistawa Szymborska

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four week study on Zoom led by Desma Lawrence
• Tuesdays, 12.00 – 2.00 pm (UK)
• 4, 11, 18 and 25 February 2025
• £120 for four meetings, including notes and texts