Top 77 Death Poem Quotes
#1. On his death bed, the eighteenth-century haiku poet Shisui had finally responded to requests for a death poem by grabbing his brush, painting his poem, and dying. On the paper Shisui's shocked followers saw he had painted a circle.
Richard Flanagan
#3. Every moment of life is the last, every poem is a death poem.
Matsuo Basho
#4. O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#5. And he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue).
Clive James
#6. I paid, got up, walked
to the door, opened
it.
I heard the man
say, "that guy's
nuts."
out on the street I
walked north
feeling
curiously
honored.
Charles Bukowski
#7. the mind is a treasure
trove, an almanac, a tomb.
Beth Morey
#9. Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.
T. S. Eliot
#10. And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night
Archibald MacLeish
#11. For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death
Then am I
A happy fly
If I live
Or if I die
William Blake
#12. I feel no grief for being called something
which
I am not;
in fact, it's enthralling, somehow, like a good
back rub
Charles Bukowski
#14. Just know I am
Not there to catch you
But I am there for you
Caleb Warta
#15. Inferno is the underworld as described in Dante Alighieri's epic poem The Divine Comedy, which portrays hell as an elaborately structured realm populated by entities known as "shades" - bodiless souls trapped between life and death.
Dan Brown
#16. When you're young
a pair of
female
high-heeled shoes
just sitting
alone
in the closet
can fire your
bones;
when you're old
it's just
a pair of shoes
without
anybody
in them
and
just as
well.
Charles Bukowski
#17. Death is buried there into death
Hunger strikes on its own last breath
No spine to shiver, no heart talks
At life's craving poverty mocks
From the poem 'Exhumation
Munia Khan
#19. Sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in.
Charles Bukowski
#20. Every known thing used to be unknown
And every rock could become a stone
Someday nature will have to atone
When soul sees dead flesh leaving the bone
Munia Khan
#21. ...and when we die
we die alone
I cry, I cry alone
Like a piece of stone
I am thrown
into the wavy ocean of life
to atone...to atone
Only to atone...
Munia Khan
#22. Welcome to thee,
O sword of eternity!
Through Buddha
And through Daruma alike
Thou hast cleft thy way.
Okakura Kakuzo
#23. My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.
James Fenton
#24. And in a mad trance
Strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings
We decay
Like corpses in a charnel
Fear & Grief
Convulse is & consume us
Day by day
And cold hopes swarm
Like worms within
Our living clay
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#25. All of these teeth had once been in real, live people. They had talked and smiled and eaten and sang and cursed and prayed. They had brushed and flossed and died. In English class, we read poems about death, but here, right in front of me was a poem about death too.
Gabrielle Zevin
#26. The closer you get to death, the more alive you feel. Dylan Thomas wrote, Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. My dad always taught me to live like that. Dad wrote a poem too. It goes, Dune buggies. Woohoo!
Christopher Titus
#27. Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet?
Boris Johnson
#28. Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis.
(This is a reference to an E.E. Cummings poem within the author's work)
Paula Hawkins
#29. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.
Frank O'Hara
#30. Death stings so harshly, no escape and hiding zone from it.
Euginia Herlihy
#31. If on thoughts of death we are fed,
Thus, a coffin, became my bed.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#32. Death stoops over me.
I'm a problem in chess. He
has the solution.
Tomas Transtromer
#33. If you are still alive when you read this,
close your eyes. I am
under their lids, growing black.
Bill Knott
#34. Maybe you think life is not worth living, but is death worth dying for?
Cesar Nascimento
#35. Time's relativity
is considered and abandoned,
for the more revelatory
experiences of starlight
in strands, and pearly
floors that span as far as
absolute compassion...
Kristen Henderson
#37. Growing older is a blurred birth certificate that only can take us to this world's perplexed journey, but it cannot smear the letters of the epitaph
Munia Khan
#39. Like young fern shoots
my child's fingers curled.
I did not expect,
in the fifth month, frost.
Lian Hearn
#40. I see a bright
portion
under the overhead light
that shades into
darkness
and then into darker
darkness
and I can't see beyond that.
Charles Bukowski
#41. Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, - knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
Wilfred Owen
#42. Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
Edgar Allan Poe
#43. The red washing
down the bathtub
can't change the color of the sea
at all.
Derrick Brown
#44. No mark survives this place: you too will yield
to unmemory.
Mathew Henderson
#45. We are all of life
who stepped from the sea
trading weightless journeys of the currents
We are all of life
who build and tear down and build again
to find gold and silver
to find scars that weep and bleed
to step from the sea
to stay with the sea
Tamara Rendell
#46. Honor Lost
Ambulant sunshine pierced
the soot covered glass ~
the feeble man wandered by
in this ritual morning pass ...
Muse
#47. Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird meaning death
T. S. Eliot
#51. Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story - or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall - is, Is it dead or alive?
Mavis Gallant
#52. I have lost you, my brother
And your death has ended
The spring season
Of my happiness,
our house is buried with you
And buried the laughter that you taught me.
There are no thoughts of love nor of poems
In my head
Since you died.
Catullus
#53. At sunset, on the river ban, Krishna
Loved her for the last time and left ...
That night in her husband's arms, Radha felt
So dead that he asked, What is wrong,
Do you mind my kisses, love? And she said,
Not not at all, but thought, What is
It to the corpse if the maggots nip?
Kamala Suraiyya Das
#54. I found the best thing
I could do
was just to type away
at my own work
and let the dying
die
as they always have.
Charles Bukowski
#55. I didn't know who to
believe
but
one thing I do
know: when a man is
living
many claim relationships
that are hardly
so
and after he dies, well,
then it's everybody's
party.
Charles Bukowski
#56. He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this.
from a Difference in Temperament
Daphne Du Maurier
#57. Parting
One is strong, a child now grown
The other weak, a parent aged
-
The strong once feeble
The weak once mighty
-
Time, the infinity
has marked them ...
Muse
#58. For a reason or a season,' he said. 'For a year or a lifetime. For a poem or a song. For a victorious battle or a bloody death. For honor. I would stand by you for as long as I might live.
Faith Hunter
#59. Death an absolute mystery. No one knows the day and the time, no one knows where and how. Death is an absolute mystery.
Euginia Herlihy
#60. At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
Arthur Golden
#62. Here is a list of terrible things,
The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings
The rabid bite of the dogs of war,
The voice of one who went before,
But most of all the mirror's gaze,
Which counts us out our numbered days.
Clive Barker
#63. Peace is a road to happiness and the future.
War is a road to destruction and death.
Debasish Mridha
#64. Having nothing to struggle
against
they have nothing to struggle
for.
Charles Bukowski
#65. One doesn't even think of
the liver
and if the liver
doesn't think of
us, that's
fine.
Charles Bukowski
#66. A poem's life and death dependeth still
Not on the poet's wits, but reader's will.
Alexander Brome
#67. Sadness isn't sadness. It's happiness in a black jacket. Tears are not tears. They're balls of laughter dipped in salt. Death is not death. It's life that's jumped off a tall cliff.
Paul McCartney
#68. Often I Wish I Were
a potato.
Eyes opened
in all directions.
Unafraid
of the cold earth.
The difference
between life and death
for somebody.
Katerina Stoykova Klemer
#69. The world is better without
them.
only the plants and the animals are
true comrades.
I drink to them and with
them.
Charles Bukowski
#70. Offering
I made a poem going
to sleep last night, woke
in sunlight, it was clean forgotten.
If it was any good, gods
of the great darkness
where sleep goes and farther
death goes, you not named,
then as true offering
accept it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#71. It is snowing and death bugs me
as stubborn as insomnia.
Anne Sexton
#72. Often in winter the end of the day is like the final metaphor in a poem celebrating death: there is no way out.
Agustin Gomez-Arcos
#73. Through the darkest hours of the night
and through the dreamers realm I seek,
Far beyond the starry sky
and beyond galaxies I am free.
Through the grimmest memories
and past a seasons air I cannot breathe,
Far beyond this mortal world
in an afterlife we shall meet.
Lee Argus
#74. It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants.
James Lee Burke
#76. The worst thing," he told me,
"is bitterness, people end up so
bitter.
Charles Bukowski
#77. A teahouse amid the cherry blossoms, on the way to death. p136
Donna Tartt
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