Cabin Fever Reliever ... Poetic Auto-Epitaphs
 

Winter has really dragged on in my neck of the woods; The last of the ice went out on Sanborn Pond last night, but there is still some patches of on snow on the shaded roadsides.

While splitting up some more firewood for the camp where I have spent winter, I came up with what I will dub Poetic Auto-Epitaphs.

Ill start the ball rolling with one for Edna St. Vincent Millay, a local lady who did good until an untimely gravity induced demise;

I burned my candle at both ends
As others have burned theirs;
Alas, I met my doom, my friends,
By falling down the stairs.

Good to see you back. Great idea!

Emily Dickinson

I banned the doctor - Willed it so -
Sickened by an -itis
And solo - went - knew when to go
Untreated for Nephritis.

Douglas, I'm surprised (nay shocked!) the ball didn't roll beyond me. Nonetheless, I'm still working to make it a worthy way to elegize a poet's death. This morning's measure:

Robert Frost

Until I reached the age of eighty-eight,
Any of the roads, both long and steep,
Were headed for fulfillment of my fate
To utter these brief breaths before I’d sleep.

Guess who?

She Writes Her Own Obituary

One dark night in the middle of December,
the long, thin hour between midnight and morning,
back came the fairy* in a pinstriped costume
on her way home from visiting her agent:
Just popped in to suggest a small assignment -
How about taking this great opportunity
to put your words in the mouth of posterity?

Then she vanished, to return a bit later,
just like the angel to Abou Ben Adhem,
but the house was still and the poet silent,
slumped on her desk with her chin on her keyboard
in front of a screen that was full of nonsense,
apart, that is, from the following sentence.

Aye, spry she was, too, for such an old woman;
could still turn a phrase like a chit of a girl...



* The word-fairy, who has long served this poet as a muse.

Song (Christina Rossetti)

Now that I'm dead, my dearest,
...As dead as dead can be,
I've changed my mind. Plant roses
...And a shady cypress tree.
Be the green grass above me
...With showers and dewdrops wet;
But dearest, please remember,
...And don't you dare forget!

I may not see the shadow,
...I may not feel the rain,
But I demand you sing sad songs
...And feel at least some pain,
For if you go on living
...And pretend we never met,
I swear, no matter where I am,
...I never shall forget.
...

Clever stuff! Of course, there must be precedent. Any other examples to know about?

Nice one, Rogerbob. Christina Georgina is probably blessing you for saying the things her maiden modesty forbade.

(Mary Elizabeth Frye)

"Do not stand at my grave and weep,"
I said, as when I'd say,
"Don't get me much--just something cheap,"
then sulked, each Mother's Day.

"Do not stand at my grave and weep,"
I said, but didn't want you
to take me at my word, you creep.
So now my sighs will haunt you.

These are great. Now IIRC Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried unpublished poems with Christina and later regretted his decision...

Cheers,
John

Not with Christina (his sister) but with Lizzie Siddal (first his muse and later his wife). And he exhumed them (and her) seven years later. He published the former and re-buried the latter.

Anne, this is a tremendous sentence and should feature in any Romantic biography: "He published the former and re-buried the latter."

If I were to use it in such a context it would require a footnote. He didn't do the digging himself and did not even attend the ghastly procedure, which was organised by one Charles Augustus Howell (known as "Owl" because one of the other muses had a cockney accent, which amused the Brotherhood no end).

It was Howell who started the story that her corpse was undecayed and that her glorious red hair (under which DGR had tucked his notebook) had continued to grow until it filled the coffin. Thus the poet could continue to believe in the permanence of his Beata Beatrix. The actual condition of the book belied the pretty notion, as not only had the worms had a good go at it, it had been treated with disinfectant at the graveside by a Dr. Llewellyn Williams who had been instructed to do this "if necessary".

Times have changed since then. I married my partner in the Intensive Care ward of our local hospital and the Chief Registrar conducted the ceremony complete with rubber gloves and the actual Register of the County of Monmouth. Since my new husband had picked up Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus in the course of his treatment, the chief witness (Senior Anaesthetist) had to spray the book as it left the ward...

(Shut up, Annie...)

My goodness! I guess those were the days of Burke and Hare.

Staph infections are no fun. But it's not every day one gets married in the Intensive Care ward, complete with rubber gloves. I was married at -10 Fahrenheit, and my oldest sister drove to the wedding an hour over ice, from Indianapolis (or rather, my nephew did).

John

More under construction:

William Carlos Williams

It all depended
from

a red-clotted
brain

in thrombosis
sleep

and I remain
there.


Stephen Crane

I said to the Universe,
"Sir, I survive!"
The Universe replied,
"Not with TB!"

T.S. Eliot

Those wasted lands, US and England
(Both my starts and terminations,
Like Four Quartets the sprout and seed)
Wasted my breath with COPD.

E.A. Robinson

I often swiped my pen at Tilbury Town
To sketch its weak, corrupt morality,
Earning the town poetical renown,
But its toxicity inflamed my C.

Sir John Betjeman

Oh! If you would remember me with praise
Then by public subscription kindly raise
A church with stained-glass triptych at the back:
Of Parkinson's, stroke, and (last) heart attack.

For myself


He always would procrastinate;
That's why, as usual, he is late.

It seems appropriate, if not required, to include Edgar Lee Masters in a thread about poetic epitaphs.

The hill above the Spoon holds many of these
imagined back when I could not conceive
my own demise so easily foretold.
I lost my own last lines as I grew old.