Tag Archives: death

Odd Poem: Rudyard Kipling, ‘Rejection’, with commentary in verse by Julie Steiner

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‘We will lay this thing here’
    Thus spake the voice of the sea,
    Murmuring wearily—
In the rock’s ear—

Then the green laver rose,
    Shook out her folds & cried,
    Before the rising tide
‘Let me repose—

Stir not my rest O sea,
    With dead things in these silent deeps,
    Surely wave tossed he sleeps
As heavily’—

The weedhung chambers then
    Made answer—’O thou sea,
    The beasts that feed in me
What need they men’—

Rock limpets cowering,
    Murmured gloom shaded—’There is meat
    Enough for all to eat
Bear hence this thing—

In thy strong arms O sea,
    Out, even to the quicksands’ brink,
    It shall be that he sink—
There, utterly.’

‘We will lay this thing here’
    Thus spake the voice of the sea,
    Ever persistently
In the rock’s ear.

*****

Julie Steiner writes: “Even Kipling seems to have had doubts about this metrically fluid, grisly poem about a wave-battered corpse, since he never included it in any of his collections. When I encountered it on the website of the Kipling Society, I immediately started writing a glosa about how strange the poem seemed to me. (A glosa is a Spanish form that meditates on another poem, by turning each line of a four-line excerpt into the refrain of a ten-line stanza.)

“To my surprise, my glosa turned into an ars poetica statement about why I’ve kept returning to certain grim topics (including child sexual abuse) in my own work, despite repeated rejection from those who turn a “rock’s ear” to them. As is their right, of course.”

*****

Glosa on Kipling’s ‘Rejection’

‘We will lay this thing here’

  Thus spake the voice of the sea,

  Murmuring wearily—

In the rock’s ear—

Off-kilter, this odd composition.
    Kipling’s, you say?
    It counters cognition
to think such a tub-thump musician
had noodled with meter that way.
Anapestic? Syllabic, at times?
    The scansion’s unclear.
    Both margins career.
Irregular pulses. Wrenched rhymes.
‘We will lay this thing here’:

So tidal vicissitudes shrug
    with listless resistance,
    refusing to lug
what a shove against gravity’s tug
can abandon. And yet there’s persistence
within this passivity, too.
    It wills itself free,
    determined to be
unburdened of what it can spew.
Thus spake the voice of the sea.

Its shape-shifting cadences show
    the moon-manic force
    as lines ebb and flow.
The sea’s letting everything go:
this thing that it wants to divorce;
    poetic convention;
attention to naysayers. (Three
    say no with esprit,
but the matter’s not up for contention.)
Murmuring wearily

becomes, by the end of the song,
Ever persistently. Yes,
    as obsessions prolong,
    revulsions grow strong.
Push on, then, Subconscious. Express
    what silent deeps hide.
We will lay this thing here.
Set it down on these pages, to clear
    the rot-ridden tide
In the rock’s ear.

*****

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego, California. Most of her published poems—many of them in repeating forms—are available on Substack at Off-Piste on Mount Parnassus (offpisteonmountp.substack.com).

Painting: Axel Johan Gustaf Acke, ‘Leander’s Body Washed Ashore’. Public domain

Sonnet: Susan McLean, ‘Day of the Dead’

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As if the day took on her warmth and calm,
above the blazing maple trees extends
a sky serenely blue. While kin and friends
assemble, breezes gentle as a balm
flutter the tablecloths and vibrant vases
of cannas and zinnias. Do we still remember,
given our lively chat and smiling faces,
we’re picnicking in volatile November?

Above the tableful of photos flies
a vee of geese, still low, in close formation,
honking in concord as they carry on
their sociable long-distance conversation.
We pause to watch them as they slowly rise
and fade until, like Mother, they are gone.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “My mother did not want a funeral, so when she died, my siblings and I were trying to find a way to commemorate her in a celebration that her family and friends could attend. Though she died in late October, the weather in Maryland had been freakishly warm for that time of year, so we chose to hold a picnic at her favorite park. I had learned about the Hispanic tradition of celebrating the Day of the Dead from my colleague Lupe Solis, so I thought that holding the picnic on November 1, with photos, flowers, and my mother’s favorite foods, would be appealing. Fort Washington Park is right on the Potomac River, and just as we had finished setting the tables, a vee of geese flew over us, still very close to the ground. The moment felt surprising and symbolic as we all stopped to watch them depart.”

This sonnet was originally published on Ken Gordon’s Substack The Sonneteer.

Susan McLean has three books of poetry: The Best Disguise, The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and her latest, Daylight Losing Time (Able Muse, 2026). She had also published a book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Crab Orchard Review, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Photo: Flying geese Jiaqian AirplaneFan Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Susan Jarvis Bryant, ‘The Dead Fox’

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Her zest has been buried for too many moons.
Tonight, she has risen to nocturnal tunes
That thrum in the hoot of a shadowy owl
And hum in the howling of wolves on the prowl.
 
She weaves and she skips beneath flickering stars
Beguiled by the bustle of bistros and bars.
Imbued with the spirit of mischief and pluck
She hoodoos the heart of each hot-blooded buck.
 
She hovers and wuthers and wafts through the crowd.
She’s hauntingly naughty and shawled in a shroud.
Now loose from her tomb with the battiest brain
She kisses the stunned Casanovas insane.
 
With sass in her sockets and snap in her bones,
With scarabs adorning her decomposed zones,
She perks every pumpkin-packed, fiend-friendly scene –
This fustiest, flirtiest trick-or-treat queen.

*****

Susan Jarvis Bryant writes: “I will admit to being a bit of a Halloween curmudgeon… unless it comes to treating and tricking with words. Every Halloween my Muse is inspired to sing of witches and warlocks and the odd dead fox… and I simply have to dance to her spooky tune.”

‘The Dead Fox’ was originally published in Snakeskin.

Susan Jarvis Bryant is originally from the UK and now lives on the coastal plains of Texas. Susan has poetry published on The Society of Classical Poets, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, Light, Sparks of Calliope, and Expansive Poetry Online, The Road Not Taken, and New English Review. She also has poetry published in The Lyric, Trinacria, and Beth Houston’s Extreme Formal Poems and Extreme Sonnets II anthologies. Susan is the winner of the 2020 International SCP Poetry Competition and was nominated for the 2022 and 2024 Pushcart Prize. She has published two books – Elephants Unleashed and Fern Feathered Edges.

Photo by Kegen Benson, BLM Wildlife Biologist. BLMUtah – Public domain – Kit Fox at Night (51191359677)

Sonnet: ‘Maz’ Griffiths, ‘Archaeology’

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Chink-chink, clunk-clunk, there’s no escape.
You spade us from the ground, then scrape
our skulls and excavate our teeth,
spread naked what once lay beneath
mute earth. You want to learn our name.
Ah, we are levelled, made the same.
This bone-yard bursting at the seams
is one deep bed of blended dreams.

Our bodies are transformed and rotten,
and what you are, we have forgotten.
We wish to feed the shrubs and trees,
to nestle wild birds as they please.
We are all light now. Do not weep.
Heap heaviness upon us. Let us sleep.

*****
Reading through ‘Maz’ Griffiths‘ poems collected as ‘Grasshopper‘, this piece felt suitably Halloweenish to share at the end of October.

Photo: One of the Batavia mutiny (1629) victims, excavated on Beacon Island and now displayed at Fremantle Shipwreck Museum. Wikimedia Commons, 7 April 2014, 06:19:51, Guy de la Bedoyere

Bartolomeo Dotti, ‘Abortion in a Flask’, tr. John Gallas

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To Giacopo Grandis, doctor and anatomist

Dear Giacopo, this sad, obscene disaster,
forever motherless, and piped of breath,
if ever it was living, died too soon,
and goes untimely to the feast of death.
And are the Humours of its tiny tub
sweet milk, or tears? For sure, its mother’s womb,
its first and living globe, was made of flesh,
and not the glass that rounds it in this tomb.
The embryo is dead: long live the corse.
Its promised Immortality cut short,
it floats in blood, aborted, come to naught.
O Man! O Slab Professors! Learn perforce
that this is Woman’s flesh and blood: more sweet,
more frail than glass; less strong than aquavit.

*****

John Gallas writes: “The ‘Abortion’ poem by Bartolomeo Dotti (1651-1713) is part of a work in progress (a History of Italy in Poems – featuring not the Great Monuments but the lesser poets from the 1st poem in Italian up to a poet b.1935). If you ever want any more, there’s 84. At least 60 rhyme and bounce.”

VII
L’ABORTO NELL’AMPOLLA
A Giacopo Grandis, fisico e anatomico

     Questo, Giacopo mio, sconcio funesto
cui diè morto natale il sen materno,
se maturo nascea, moria ben presto,
e voi d’intempestivo il fèste eterno.
     Non so se dolce latte o pianto mesto
gli sia di quel cristal l’umore interno;
so ben che l’alvo suo fu come questo,
poi ch’utero da vetro io non discerno.
     Vive quasi per voi chi per sé langue;
embrïone morì, scheletro nacque,
fatto parto immortal d’aborto essangue.
     Uomo, impara! Insegnarti al Grandi piacque
che sia ventre di donna e maschio sangue
piú fral del vetro e men vital de l’acque.

There is a brief outline of Dotti’s turbulent life here.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.  


Paul Burgess, ‘Another Old, Familiar Story’

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“The strong survive, and all of that,”
he’d tell the limply dangling cloth
between his beak, a former moth,
but doesn’t sense the lunging cat,

who doesn’t think the wheels that run
consider cats their proper prey.
Yet, now he’s just a dead display
beneath the slowly dying sun.

Who knows if later down the road
that truck won’t strike a rotting tree
and bring to bear on top of me
its paralyzing wooden load?

Though like a reel of comic scenes,
it’s also how our stories go:
the endings are the same, we know,
but brought about by varied means.

*****

Paul Burgess writes: “Earlier in the summer, a bird appeared in front of me casually holding a dying moth and looking almost cheerful. The encounter got me thinking about deaths that come suddenly, without malice, and without much meaning to the creatures or things that have caused them. I can’t say exactly why, but some combination of my mood and the circumstances made the sight more vivid and significant to me than it might have been on another day.”

‘Another Old, Familiar Story’ was first published in Snakeskin.

Paul Burgess is the sole proprietor of a business in Lexington, Kentucky that offers ESL classes in addition to English, Japanese, and Spanish-language translation and interpretation services. He has recently contributed work to The Road Not Taken, Blue Unicorn, Light, The Orchards, Pulsebeat, Snakeskin, Lighten Up Online, and several other publications.  https://paulburgesswritingandlanguage.blog/

“Kaka (Nestor sp) and Pururi Moth (Aenetus virescens)” by Nga Manu Images NZ is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Richard Meyer, ‘Argos’

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Odysseus, the master home again
after long wandering strange lands and seas,
contending twenty years with monsters, men,
and gods, observed his dog beset with fleas,
decrepit, curled upon a pile of dung,
ignored, abandoned by a careless world.

Thus lay Argos. Swarms of flies buzzed and swirled
around his wasted body. His head hung.
His legs lacked strength to stand. But that one voice
he knew. A scent he’d always recognize.
The man, to guard his beggarly disguise,
withheld all signs of care. He had no choice.

The dog’s ears pricked. He feebly wagged his tail.
Then knowing that his master had returned
he died. Odysseus shed hidden tears.
He dared not stroke the dog. Within he burned.
This final comrade lost to no avail,
and lost forever all those missing years.

*****
Richard Meyer writes: “After many decades, I’m reading The Odyssey again, the highly acclaimed translation by Robert Fitzgerald (1961). It won major awards and is considered a classic. Selections from the Fitzgerald translation were in high school English textbooks for years, including the one I used when teaching. I was prompted to revisit The Odyssey after seeing Christopher Nolan’s much talked about recent film adaptation of the ancient epic. The scene with Odysseus and his old dog Argos is one of the well-known episodes in The Odyssey, and a few days ago I had the notion to condense the scene into a modern poem. Most of my poems are written in the new formalism style, using rhyme, meter, and the traditional tools of poetry. In ‘Argos’ I use an irregular rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter meter, with occasional metrical variations for effect.”

‘Argos’ was first published in Facebook.

Richard Meyer, a former English and humanities teacher, lives in Mankato, MN. His book of poems Orbital Paths was a silver medalist winner in the 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards. He was awarded the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize for his poem “Fieldstone.” His poetry has appeared in a variety of print and online journals and has also received top honors several times in the Great River Shakespeare Festival sonnet contest. He is also the author of Wise Heart, a memoir of his mother Gert who was born in poverty, came of age during the Great Depression, enlisted in the army during World War II, served overseas, achieved the rank of first sergeant, and was awarded the Bronze Star for meritorious service performed during the Battle of the Bulge. Richard’s most recent book is Stumbling Onward, a collection of new and selected poems – and a 2026 revision contains over 50 new poems. His books are available on Amazon. 

“Dying dog” by Tostito Verde is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.


Maryann Corbett, ‘Buying a Plot in Plague Time’

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Shouldn’t the moment be more–well, dramatic?
Shouldn’t it toll like Donne’s dead-bell? But no.
Mere paper-rustling. It’s a burst of static
That stutters off to silence, while late snow
Alights outside and melts forgettably,
A numb reminder. Nothing I can see
In the small print addresses dread, or God,
Or love. Somber reflection? Not a bit.
Forms in quadruplicate:
White over yellow, pink, and goldenrod,

For a dead end. No hymns, no holiness–
No funeral; every gathering spreads the plague.
Perfunctory forms depress me, and they press
Me now, because I’ve left so much so vague.
When until now has dying loomed so real
I shrank from my dead flesh? Or when did I feel
This keen to leave less horror for my son
And daughter? Save them shock-and-awe about
Choices, when mine run out?
I mutter grimly, I will get this done.

And still I sit here, playing my numbers game,
Tossing my rhyme-pairs into the winds of fear.
Back to the labor. Back to the minor shame
Of shuffling off my life (check there, sign here).
Earth gets my ashes–grudgingly, on terms
That reek of real estate and legal firms.
Transfer-on-death arrangements and new will
Spew gray phrases: drone and drone and drone.
Like worrying a bone,
This work to stifle terrors I can’t kill.

So work–bending the spirit to the letter,
Bowing the head at how the flesh unweaves–
Goes down like a stiff drink; the ache’s no better
Yet, for the iron aftertaste it leaves.
Here, plague: take this dull prose; spare those I love.
I sign at all the Xs (and to prove
My resoluteness, press hard on the pen),
Scribble the check and seal the envelope.
Clinging weakly to hope,
I thumb the stamp on. No one says Amen.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “It’s clear, I think, that this poem (first published in Modern Age) dates from the worst days of the Covid pandemic, in 2020 when there was no vaccine, when isolation was the only control, and when the thought of death was pervasive. As my own age cohort was dying in droves, I did think it prudent to make plans in case the worst happened. My ruminations on the process arranged themselves in a shape like that of Larkin’s Aubade.”

‘Buying a Plot in Plague Time’, first published in Modern Age, is collected in The O in the Air.

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry. A seventh book, Notifications from the Unseen, is forthcoming from Slant Books.”

Photo: “Roman Catholic Division C, Row 16, Plot 43” by Discover Waikumete Cemetery is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Excerpt, semi-formal: Matthew Arnold, ‘A Summer Night’ (2)

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And the rest, a few,
Escape their prison and depart
On the wide ocean of life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where’er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor doth he know how there prevail,
Despotic on that sea,
Trade-winds which cross it from eternity.
Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind and blackening waves.
And then the tempest strikes him; and between
The lightning-bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguished face and flying hair
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false, impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom,
And he too disappears, and comes no more.

*****

This fragment is the response to the previous excerpt from Matthew Arnold’s ‘A Summer Night’ that I blogged two days ago. As a teen in a well-regimented boarding school I found that previous fragment terrifying with its prospect of living as a bored wage-slave forever, and this second fragment exhilarating in its freedom despite the expectation of catastrophe. Altogether a very subversive poem, and I thank my schooling for including such works. For the next couple of decades I followed the wild path, failing to earn a degree at universities in three countries, never holding a job for more than 18 months, frequently moving. Eventually I found an occupation that was constantly changing, where Eliza and I were our own bosses, and that took us to dozens of countries to teach business seminars. So that successfully combined the wage-slave and the freed prisoner, and it all worked out.

Arnold originally ended his poem:

Is there no life, but these alone?
Madman or slave must man be one?

But ten years later he added a much more wishy-washy piece about learning from the pure heavens and seeing what a nice life you could make for yourself. I always thought he should have stopped with the original “madman or slave” view of life: much more dramatic! But his later addition was probably justified…

“Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth” by hyperion327 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. (Note: the painting is by J.M.W. Turner, of course.)

Ballade: Gail White, ‘After the Opera’

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Although we came in hopes to find
the most amazing staging yet,
the final act still filled the mind
with all the trappings of regret.
Although the happy lovers met
with joyous singing – hers and his –
we’ve seen from Carmen to Cosette
how sad the ending always is.

Why do we cry for womankind,
for Tosca on the parapet,
for Butterfly, her love declined,
for Manon and for Juliet?
Haven’t we seen the sweetest pet
fall victim to the wily Wiz?
Haven’t we seen – from death to debt –
how sad the ending always is?

The villain always lurks behind
the arras, holding out the net
that will entrap the golden hind,
the mark of arrows ready set.
At first we didn’t feel the threat;
we never thought our hopes a chiz,
But now we’ve learned our alphabet:
How sad the ending always is!

But pour champagne, my friends, and let
the golden bubbles rise and fizz!
For just a moment we’ll forget
how sad the ending always is.

*****

Gail White writes: “It was Barbara Loots who called my attention to the fact that the plots of many operas could end with the words “and then she dies.”  Being an opera heroine is almost always fatal.  My first poem on this theme was a short one,  “Opera Rondeau”.  Then it occurred to me that the same idea would support a ballade.  Writing this was fun, as finding enough rhymes for “is” pushed me into the realm of slang.  And, of course, life is indeed a process of finding happy distractions from an inevitable tragic ending.”

‘After the Opera’ was first published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Gail White is a widely published Formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her new chapbook, Paper Cuts, is out on Amazon or from Kelsay Books. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats.

“This picture makes me happy” by James Jordan is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.