The Greek anthology is full of these things.

X.J. Kennedy has one I love. It reminds me a bit of Housman's Revolution, in its conceit of the shadow of night going round the earth like a jump rope. Small but perfect:

Little Elegy
for a child who skipped rope

Here lies resting, out of breath,
Out of turns, Elizabeth
Whose quicksilver toes not quite
Cleared the whirring edge of night.

Earth whose circles round us skim
Till they catch the lightest limb,
Shelter now Elizabeth
And for her sake trip up death.


And this one always gets me:

Aphra Behn

Epitaph on the Tombstone of a Child, the Last of Seven that Died Before

This little, silent, gloomy monument,
Contains all that was sweet and innocent;
The softest prattler that e'er found a tongue,
His voice was music and his words a song;
Which now each list'ning angel smiling hears,
Such pretty harmonies compose the spheres;
Wanton as unfledg'd cupids, ere their charms
Had learn'd the little arts of doing harms;
Fair as young cherubins, as soft and kind,
And though translated, could not be refin'd;
The seventh dear pledge the nuptial joys had given,
Toil'd here on Earth, retir'd to rest in Heaven;
Where they the shining host of angels fill,
Spread their gay wings before the throne, and smile.

I can never read this one without choking up. It was written by Oscar Wilde for his little sister Isola who died two months before her 10th birthday....



Requiescat

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman so
Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast.
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.



.

I've only read snippets of it, but Mallarme wrote a whole book of fragments of verse after the death of his son Anatole. Moving, and yet oddly in line with the aestheticism of his other verse.

Here's a couple of extracts:

ailing in
springtime
mourned in autumn
--celestial soul
----
the wave -
idea attacks

the highest aim
nothing but
to part pure
from life
you accomplish it
in advance
in suffering
all this--gentle
infant so that
This will be counted
part of your due--your kin
have bought the rest by their
suffering the loss forever

Stuart

Another death-of-sibling poem, a fine one by Seamus Heaney:

Mid-term Break


I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

Beautiful, sad poems, all of these.
What could move a poet more than the death of a child, and all that fulfilment unfulfilled?
I expect everyone knows Dylan Thomas's poem, but I'll post it here anyway:


A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London


Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Dylan Thomas

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.

~~

I have heard it suggested that this Sonnet is in reference to his son's death. I don't know how unorthodox that idea is, or whether there is any independent scholarship backing it up. (As appealing as the interpretation is, I'm skeptical).

Golias,
The choir The Sixteen produced an album Into the Light, which has an arrangement by Bob Chilcott of the Pachelbel Canon, using the text of Wilde's Requiescat. It's lovely piece, the best rendition of the Canon I know.
Brian

poem
 

I have not experienced such loss, but this poem always struck me as particularly tender. It was written by Izumi Shikibu in c. 1023 when her nine year-old daughter died:

Why did you vanish
into empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls into the world.

Translation by Jane Hirshfield.

dwl

poem
 

And this one, by Ted Kooser, still makes cry:

A Child's Grave Marker

A small block of granite
engraved with her name and the dates
just wasn't quite pretty enough
for this lost little girl
or her parents, who added a lamb
cast in plaster of paris,
using the same kind of cake mold
my grandmother had--iron,
heavy and black as a skillet.
The lamb came out coconut-white,
and seventy years have proven it
soft in the rain. On this hill,
overlooking a river in Iowa,
it melts in its own sweet time.

Here is one by Leo Haber from Blood to Remember, an anthology of poems about the Holocaust.

Sanctification *

Let us mourn the murder of children together,
You and I, in the graceful form of the rhymed
Sonnet, dimensions of meaning, rigidly timed
Ritual of comfort at the brutal end of one’s tether.
Young Alena Synkova tethered to L
410 spoke for all the children in free
Verse and fourteen short lines. Listen! See
the child in her innocent wisdom outwitting hell.

“Listen! / The boat whistle has sounded now / And we
Must sail / Out toward an unknown port / We’ll sail a long
Long Way / And dreams will turn to truth . . . / Just look up

To heaven / And think about the violets.” See
The child in the chamber of gas, listen to her song,
Mourn with the Kaddish; bless with the Kiddush cup.
____________


*The quotations in this poem are from a fourteen-line poem, “To Olga,” by L410, the number of one of the children’s homes in the Terezín concentration camp, circa 1943–44.

(Blood to remember: American poets on the Holocaust / edited by
Charles Adés Fishman)

John Crowe Ransom, "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter"

There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.

Her wars were bruited in our high window.
We looked among orchard trees and beyond
Where she took arms against her shadow,
Or harried unto the pond

The lazy geese, like a snow cloud
Dripping their snow on the green grass,
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose, Alas,

For the tireless heart within the little
Lady with rod that made them rise
From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle
Goose-fashion under the skies!

But now go the bells, and we are ready,
In one house we are sternly stopped
To say we are vexed at her brown study,
Lying so primly propped.