The most beautiful poems for funerals

Remember 

Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,

         Gone far away into the silent land;

         When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

         You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

         Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

         And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

         For if the darkness and corruption leave

         A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

         Than that you should remember and be sad.

 

Funeral Blues

W. H. Auden 

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

 

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

 

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

 

'Do not stand at my grave and weep' 

Mary Elizabeth Frye

 Do not stand at my grave and weep 

I am not there. I do not sleep. 

I am a thousand winds that blow. 

I am the diamond glints on snow. 

 

I am the sunlight on ripened grain. 

I am the gentle autumn rain. 

When you awaken in the morning's hush 

I am the swift uplifting rush 

 

Of quiet birds in circled flight. 

I am the soft stars that shine at night. 

Do not stand at my grave and cry; 

I am not there. I did not die. 

 

Those Winter Sundays

Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Music 

Percy Bysshe Shelley

 Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory—

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,

Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

Love itself shall slumber on. 

 

Epitaph On A Friend 

Robert Burns

 An honest man here lies at rest,

The friend of man, the friend of truth,

The friend of age, and guide of youth:

Few hearts like his, with virtue warm'd,

Few heads with knowledge so inform'd;

If there's another world, he lives in bliss;

If there is none, he made the best of this.

  

Yes

Tess Gallagher

 Now we are like that flat cone of sand

in the garden of the Silver Pavilion in Kyoto

designed to appear only in moonlight.

 

Do you want me to mourn?

Do you want me to wear black?

 

Or like moonlight on whitest sand

to use your dark, to gleam, to shimmer?

 

I gleam. I mourn.

 

No Time

Billy Collins

 In a rush this weekday morning,

I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery

where my parents are buried

side by side beneath a slab of smooth granite.

 

Then, all day, I think of him rising up

to give me that look

of knowing disapproval

while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.

 

Crossing the Bar

Alfred, Lord Tennyson 

Sunset and evening star,

      And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

      When I put out to sea,

 

   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

      Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

      Turns again home.

 

   Twilight and evening bell,

      And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

      When I embark;

 

   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.

 

Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud

John Donne

 Death, be not proud, though some have called thee 

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; 

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow 

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. 

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, 

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow, 

And soonest our best men with thee do go, 

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery. 

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, 

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, 

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well 

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then? 

One short sleep past, we wake eternally 

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die. 

 Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud

Audre Lorde

I

Is the total black, being spoken

From the earth's inside.

There are many kinds of open.

How a diamond comes into a knot of flame   

How a sound comes into a word, coloured   

By who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open

Like a diamond on glass windows

Singing out within the crash of passing sun

Then there are words like stapled wagers

In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart—

And come whatever wills all chances

The stub remains

An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.

Some words live in my throat

Breeding like adders. Others know sun

Seeking like gypsies over my tongue

To explode through my lips

Like young sparrows bursting from shell.

Some words

Bedevil me.

Love is a word another kind of open—

As a diamond comes into a knot of flame

I am black because I come from the earth's inside   

Take my word for jewel in your open light. 

'That it will never come again'

Emily Dickinson

 That it will never come again

Is what makes life so sweet.

Believing what we don't believe

Does not exhilarate.

 

That if it be, it be at best

An ablative estate --

This instigates an appetite

Precisely opposite. 

 

Requiem

Robert Louis Stevenson

 Under the wide and starry sky  

  Dig the grave and let me lie:  

Glad did I live and gladly die,  

  And I laid me down with a will.  

  

This be the verse you 'grave for me:         

  Here he lies where he long'd to be;  

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,  

  And the hunter home from the hill.

Buy the book

To find solace from grief, we have always turned to the written word. With poetry and prose spanning continents, religions and cultures, this moving anthology examines loss, celebrates lives well lived and offers words of consolation.

Helpfully divided into different sections, Funeral Readings and Poems features many famous poems such as ‘Funeral Blues’ by W. H. Auden and ‘How do I Love Thee?’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, alongside comforting prose from the likes of Louisa May Alcott and Kenneth Graham.

Buy the book

Buy the book

The poems in The Picador Book of Funeral Poems, designed for those in need of poetic solace, are drawn from many different ages and cultures, reminding us that the experience of loss is a universally human one. 

Buy the book