by Whitman · Cluster: Grief and Loss · Elegy · Clothing and Costume
Abstract
A free-verse elegy and verbal tombstone to the poet’s dead mother as the ideal woman; themes of death, grief, motherhood and memory.
Connections
Motifs: Death, Grave, Memory Themes & Concepts: Grief and Loss Forms & Genres: Elegy
Testo integrale / Full text
Cluster: SONGS OF PARTING
As at thy portals also death,
Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds,
To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, maternity,
To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me,
(I see again the calm benignant face fresh and beautiful still,
I sit by the form in the coffin,
I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the cheeks,
the closed eyes in the coffin;)
To her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth,
life, love, to me the best,
I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs,
And set a tombstone here.