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Wendy Martin and Camille MederClaremont Graduate University

Death and mourning have been thematic preoccupations of poetry through the ages; of course, the meaning of these universal human experiences is inflected by a particular historical period as well as the national and cultural context, including race, gender, and class, that frames a given poem. This essay will explore how death and dying are represented within larger historical and cultural contexts in a range of poems from the Puritans to the modernists.

Puritans in the New World had very clear-cut ideas about what happened after death, which was viewed as a portal to Heaven and everlasting life for those who were among the predestined “elect,” or to Hell and eternal damnation. Although they believed in predestination, Puritans thought that struggling against sin and the ever-present lures of Satan was a sign, though not a guarantee, of salvation. They also struggled against a self-centered worldliness: Richard Baxter, for example, asserted, “Man’s fall was his turning from God to himself; and his regeneration consisteth in the turning of him from himself to God” (cited in Bercovitch 1975, p. 17). Puritan certainty in the afterlife and commitment to obeying God’s will produced a poetics of death that upheld notions of divinely sanctioned order and deemphasized human mourning in favor of finding solace in promises of salvation.

The poems of Edward Taylor (c.1642–1729) focus on original sin, saving grace, redemption through faith in Christ, the division of mankind into the damned and the elect, and the joys of eternal salvation. “Huswifery” (1685) creates an extended metaphor of the spinning wheel to describe the poet’s spiritual submission to an all-powerful savior, which includes the expectation of salvation and eternal life through God’s grace:

Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,

Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory;

My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fill

My wayes with glory and thee glorify.

Then mine apparell shall display before yee

That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.

(lines 13–18)

In his poem “Upon Wedlock, and the Death of Children” (written c. 1682), Taylor celebrates his joyful marriage and the birth of his children only to experience the death of some of his offspring. The poet is resolved to transcend grief and consecrate the lives of his dead children to God, and Taylor’s faith in God’s omnipotence enables him to endure his painful loss:

But pausing on’t, this Sweet perfum’d my thought,

Christ would in Glory have a Flowre, Choice, Prime.

And having Choice, chose this my branch forth brought.

Lord, take’t I thanke thee, thou takst ought of mine;

It is my pledg in glory; part of mee

Is now in it, Lord, glorifi’de with thee.

(lines 25–30)

Taylor is comforted by his belief that his children have gone to Heaven where they will glorify God.¹

However, Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) struggles with the imperative to consecrate her life as well the lives of her progeny to God. Bradstreet became the first female Puritan to have her poems published in The Tenth Muse (1650). At times, Bradstreet’s poetry relies on God’s redemptive power to triumph over sickness and death. For example, she opens her meditation on “May 11, 1661” (1867b²) by noting that God “hath restored, redeemed, recured [her]/From sickness, death, and pain” (lines 3–4), and in “By Night When Others Soundly Slept” (1867a) she thanks her “Savior” (line 15) for banishing her “doubts and fears” (line 14). However, Bradstreet’s poems often focus on this life rather than the next. Unlike Taylor, who dedicates the lives of his dead children to God, Bradstreet is reluctant to relinquish her grandson’s life in “On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet, Who Died on 16 November, 1669, Being but a Month, and One Day Old” (1867c). Her resignation about accepting what seems to her to be an arbitrary death seems forced, and it appears that she is compelling herself to accept it as part of God’s plan:

Cropt by th’ Almighty’s hand; yet is He good.

With dreadful awe before Him let’s be mute,

Such was His will, but why, let’s not dispute,

With humble hearts and mouths put in the dust,

Let’s say He’s merciful as well as just.

(lines 8–12)

Unresolved juxtapositions—God has “Cropt” the infant, “yet is He good”—and the repetition of “let’s” question religious doctrine.

When she considers her own possible death in childbirth, Bradstreet foregrounds her love and concern for her children in her absence instead of anticipating Heaven: she pleads with her husband to protect her children from possible “injury” from an uncaring “step-dame” in “Before the Birth of One of Her Children” (1678a): “Look to my little babes, my dear remains./And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,/These O protect from step-dame’s injury” (lines 22–24). Bradstreet’s emphasis is not on her soul but on her earthly “remains,” her children.

Similarly, in one of Bradstreet’s best-known poems, “Contemplations” (1678b), the joy of earthly existence seems to take precedence over eternal life as Bradstreet resigns herself to leaving the glory of this world for a heavenly destination:

Then higher on the glistering Sun I gazed,

Whose beams was shaded by the leavie Tree;

The more I looked, the more I grew amazed,

And softly said, “What glory’s like to thee?”

(lines 23–26)

While both poets were influenced by Puritan religious beliefs, Taylor’s poems emphasize the importance of devout faith, religious conviction, and spiritual submission to God’s will. In contrast, family and the experiences of quotidian life are central to Bradstreet, and her poetry expresses reluctance to leave her beloved world for the next.

Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American poets mourning the loss of loved ones or national figures often focused on the pious and virtuous lives of the deceased. These years saw the continued growth of nationalism as well as individualism. Phillis Wheatley’s (c. 1753–1784) “On the Death of the Rev. MR. GEORGE WHITEFIELD” (1770) adapts several techniques common in colonial elegies. Puritans viewed colonizing America as God’s will, and Sacvan Bercovitch writes that colonial elegies “[use] the saint’s glorification to project the country’s coming glory [… and…] translate private loss into an affirmation not (primarily) of immortality but of political continuity” (1975, p. 120). Wheatley’s poem notes that the deceased will “[leave] the earth for heav’n’s unmeasur’d height” (line 12), a journey described to evoke the voyage to America: “[Whitefield] sails to Zion through vast seas of day” (line 15).³ The image suggests that salvation in Heaven and life in America are both God’s gifts to the faithful, fitting given Whitefield’s dual religious-patriotic work: “He pray’d that grace in ev’ry heart might dwell,/He long’d to see America excel[…]” (lines 20–21). Read in the context of Wheatley’s overall support for emancipation and the American Revolution,⁴ Wheatley’s elegy for Whitefield suggests that supporting the cause of increased political freedom was a divine mission and such a death was especially deserving of salvation.

In the nineteenth century, especially in the 1850s and 1860s, much American poetry was shaped by a sentimental tradition exemplified by the “Sweet Singer of Hartford,” Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865). Her poems are characterized by themes of traditional domesticity, conventional religious tropes, and diction that is often bathetic. “Death of an Infant” (1827) illuminates the power of the promise of an eternal home in Heaven to subdue grief—in Sigourney’s case, the deeply painful experience of three miscarriages. This poem assures the reader that death cannot steal the life of her dead baby who is bound for Heaven:

[...] But there beam’d a smile

So fix’d and holy from that marble brow, –

Death gazed and left it there; – he dared not steal

The signet-ring of Heaven.

(lines 12–15)

In the nineteenth century, as in Puritan times, people mostly died at home. A body was kept in the home for several days—the “wake”—in part to ensure that the person was truly dead; the funeral also took place at home (National Museum of Funeral History n.d.). Poetry and other writing reflect this familiarity with the dying body. Lewis Saum notes that letters of the time often describe individuals’ deaths in “physiological detail” (1975, pp. 33–34). Observers felt that a “sober, explicit statement of submission to God’s will by the dying” (Saum 1975, p. 43) signified faith. In the best cases their apparent “Happiness and triumph” showed that “death represented escape from the world’s sadness” (Saum 1975, pp. 46–48). Thus, the smile in “Death of an Infant” was understood in the nineteenth century as proof that the child was going to Heaven.

Sigourney was one of many writers of “consolation literature,” which regarded mourning as underscoring the belief that “heaven [is] a continuation and a glorification of the domestic sphere” (Douglas 1975, p. 55). This was part of a shift toward the “emergence of a modern Heaven” as a human society where ideal human relationships flourished (McDannell and Lang 1988, pp. 181–227). Until the funeral industry’s professionalization in the late nineteenth century, loved ones washed and dressed the body for burial, and Farrell reports that this task frequently fell to women (1980, p. 147). Differences in domestic responsibilities including those pertaining to death may help to explain gendered dimensions to mourning in poetry. In recalling differences between Bradstreet and Taylor, we might consider whether female American poets in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries often displayed an increased emphasis on the body and earthly life.

In contrast to the religious trope of salvation by an all-powerful redeemer and the promise of eternal life, “Thanatopsis” (1821⁵) by William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) meditates on death as the conclusion to a finite life that should be lived well. The poem gives no promise of an afterlife, no invocation of a higher power; instead, only nature is eternal and is the universal grave of all living creatures. The speaker suggests finding respite by viewing death as in accordance with the laws of nature: “[…] When thoughts/Of the last bitter hour come like a blight/Over thy spirit […],” he recommends, “Go forth, under the open sky, and list/To Nature’s teachings […]” (p.32). The poem suggests that death is a return to nature:

[…] Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim

Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up

Thine individual being, shalt thou go

To mix for ever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock[.]

(p. 32)

The universal experience of death as a return to the Earth is an egalitarian—democratic—interpretation of death, unlike the Puritan division between the elect and the damned. Farrell suggests that a novel shift toward viewing death as “reunion of the dead with nature” occurred around this time and was reflected in the rural cemetery movement (1980, p. 105). Bryant also suggests that the best way to experience a sense of peace when confronted by death is to have lived well:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan, which moves

To that mysterious realm, where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,

Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

(p. 34)

The shift toward viewing death as a reunion with nature was also reflected in the rural cemeteries. Mount Auburn—formed in 1831—was pleasant for the living to visit due to its pastoral landscaping. These new burial places were made popular not only by logistical factors like “rapid urban growth and population mobility” that pushed burial to rural areas but also by “revisions of religious doctrines, Romantic affection for Nature” (Farrell 1980, p. 102). Stanley French argues that the “creation of Mount Auburn marked a change in prevailing attitudes about death and burial” (1975, p. 70).

Perhaps no American poet more embodies the struggle between religious faith and profound agnosticism which leads to the rejection of a belief in salvation by a supreme God and an afterlife than Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). Many of Dickinson’s poems and letters chronicle her agonized questioning of death and its aftermath, and after a protracted and arduous struggle with the religious beliefs of her family and community, Dickinson creates her personal poetic ontology in which home is paradise, nature is sacred, and art is eternal.⁶ Courageously accepting the inevitability of death, Dickinson’s poems celebrate her deepest convictions that, in the context of mortality, we should appreciate the gift of this life. Her poems explore a wide range of emotions ranging from fury to ecstasy, encompassing the complexities of love, the challenge of autonomy, the wonders of nature, and the inevitability of dying and death, as well as chronicling her profound struggles with the full range of emotions about life’s most primal experiences.

Dickinson was a modernist before her time, and her terse, often enigmatic, poems with staccato phrasing punctuated with dashes, syncopated rhythms, and few rhymes are the antithesis of the rigid rhymes and meters of nineteenth-century sentimental American poetry. Upending the Victorian moralistic interpretation that a peaceful, painless death indicates a Heavenly destination while pain and agony portend eternal damnation, Dickinson portrays death as a quotidian bodily process. In “I heard a Fly buzz” (#465; written c. 1862), she writes that “The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –/And Breaths were gathering firm” (p. 223, lines 5–6).

Dickinson’s refusal to devalue life on earth in exchange for the promise of a Christian afterlife is threaded through her poems as can be seen in “To be alive – is Power –” (#677; written c. 1863):

To be alive — is Power —

Existence — in itself —

Without a further function —

Omnipotence — Enough —

To be alive — and Will!

‘Tis able as a God —

The Maker — of Ourselves — be what —

Such being Finitude!

(pp. 335–336)

After conquering her profound fear of death and its aftermath, Dickinson’s hard-won acceptance of mortality transmuted her anxiety into a powerful conviction that this life is all the more precious:

Did life’s penurious length

Italicize its sweetness,

The men that daily live

Would stand so deep in joy […]

(#1717, 1945,⁷ p. 697, lines 1–4)

Dickinson’s poetry was boldly original, not only because she refused to write lines that were formulaically rhymed and metered but also because she wanted to capture the dynamic process of unfolding thought; this radical approach to writing poetry foreshadowed the early twentieth-century modernist stream of consciousness. Learning as she goes, the poet takes risks and confronts dangers in order to embrace each moment as fully as possible. The reward for taking this perilous journey is the hard-won emotional wisdom and balanced perspective gained from experience.

In the Civil War era, while a belief in the Christian afterlife remained prevalent, ideas about death and dying also encompassed ideas about heroism and nation. Mark Schantz notes that cultural notions surrounding death “made it easier to kill and to be killed […] They knew that their heroic achievements would be cherished forever by posterity […] They saw how notions of full citizenship were predicated on the willingness of men to lay down their lives” (2008, p. 2). In Whitman’s elegy mourning the assassination of Lincoln in 1865, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865⁸), we see again that national leaders can serve as exemplars for how to live and how to be mourned. This was a trend in writing of the time: eulogies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson when they both died on July 4, 1826 emphasize their “spirit of resignation” in the face of death (Schantz 2008, p. 23) that continued to be prized, and Schantz argues that such writing “provided Americans with scripts for how to confront, and embrace, death itself” (2008, p. 19).

The speaker’s grief in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is national in the sense that the speaker mourns not only for Lincoln—“Nor for you, for one alone,/Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring” (lines 46–47). Lincoln’s coffin becomes a symbol of the coffins of all men who were killed in the war and thus an expression of American unity in grief. Whitman recounts the “Coffin that passes through lanes and streets” (line 33) when Lincoln’s coffin was brought on a tour around the nation, and describes how Lincoln is grieved by crowds of mourners with a “thousand voices rising strong and solemn” (line 40). For Whitman, the act of mourning the deceased individual in the funeral importantly memorializes the significance of the person who has died. Perhaps such symbolic displays as that for Lincoln were comforting since these rituals were not always possible during the war. Whitman’s poem also recalls associations between patriotism and burial implicit in the rural cemetery movement. The rural cemetery was supposed to “elevate and strengthen patriotism” (French 1975, p. 81), especially by providing a sense of history (p. 89). The increased emphasis on the funeral was also reflected in the increasing importance of embalming, which facilitated Lincoln’s posthumous tour. During the Civil War, bodies were often embalmed to be shipped home to their families, and this practice grew increasingly popular after the war for logistical reasons (such as transporting the body of someone who lived far from family) as well as sentimental ones (Farrell 1980, pp. 158–159). Embalming continued as the funeral ceremony and celebration and preservation of the body became magnified in the modern era⁹ amid heightened anxiety about death.

Modernist rejection of religious and civic authority heightened skepticism about the concept of eternal life in Heaven after death. Like Emily Dickinson, the modernists emphasize this life on Earth as the only life there is. World War I (1914–1918) was the first war to involve so many nations that had access to such a high level of destructive technology (Hobsbawm 1994, pp. 22–23). These years also saw the 1918 flu pandemic, which resulted in more deaths than the war.¹⁰ With death so prevalent, and stripped of the comforting beliefs of earlier eras to modulate the fear of death or the grief at the loss of loved ones, modernist poets faced death with contradictory processes of acceptance, hopelessness, and denial.

In a December 1934 essay in The Atlantic titled “Death is a Stranger,” M. Beatrice Blankenship argued that the loss of traditional rituals and beliefs made mourning deceased loved ones more challenging (cited in Samuel 2013, p. 25). By the 1930s, most people died in hospitals rather than at home. Death—a familiar presence in Puritan times—seemed distant except when it was too close: with longer lifespans than ever, people were less resigned to the idea that they or their children might die at any moment. People also had less interaction with the dead body than ever before. While most funerals were still held in the home during the first half of the twentieth century, to an increasing extent they took place in funeral homes (Farrell 1980, pp. 172–173). Meanwhile, care for the body had by then largely transitioned into the hands of professionals (Farrell 1980, pp. 148–157).

Increased secularization also brought changes in how people lived and thought about death. Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” (1923¹¹) centers lived experience in the world as a source of pleasure and meaning:

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

(lines 16–22)

Life, Stevens argues, is more meaningful because of death, because it prevents us from taking for granted life’s fleeting pleasures: “[Death] causes boys to pile new plums and pears/On disregarded plate” (lines 73–74). This idea was similar to ideas found in the brief years of the “New Death” ideal. This movement began around 1910 and its advocates, like Winifred Kirkland, suggested that a realistic appraisal of death and its presence in everyday life might cause people to live better and face death with acceptance (cited in Farrell 1980, p. 144).

Modern poetry is fixated on memory of and quotidian objects touched or used by the deceased, which take the place of secure cultural scripts about the afterlife. We can see this pattern in “Music I Heard” (1916) by Conrad Aiken (1889–1973):

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,

And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.

These things do not remember you, beloved:

And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

(lines 5–8)

These objects—table, silver, glass—have an almost sacramental value to the mourner. The challenge is accepting that someone “beautiful and wise” (line 12) is no more and there remain only the objects that the person touched.

Similarly, Edna St. Vincent Millay suggests in “Sonnet II” (1917) that while there is no respite from the grief of losing a loved one to death, memories are embodied in the physical places and feelings that the speaker and the deceased experienced together:

There are a hundred places where I fear

To go,—so with his memory they brim.

And entering with relief some quiet place

Where never fell his foot or shone his face

I say, “There is no memory of him here!”

And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

(lines 9–14)

Like Aiken, Millay embeds memories in objects and places, but ultimately she realizes that they are truly within the bereaved. Yet Millay also wrestles with the possibility of oblivion. In “Elegy Before Death” (1921) she anticipates the death and erasure of a loved one, noting: “Spring will not ail nor autumn falter;/Nothing will know that you are gone” (lines 9–10). Millay is ambivalent about the way the natural world will continue with little regard for a human loss. However, she indicates that to the speaker some of the beauty will be gone from the world—“Only the light from common water,/Only the grace from simple stone!” (lines 19–20). While the cycles of nature are not paused by this death, life is no longer as meaningful. Millay here codes memory as an absence: that in no longer experiencing what was experienced before (the enhanced beauty of the world), that sensation of increased emptiness is a form of memory. Similarly to “Elegy before Death,” “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1918) by Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) suggests that even humanity could be forgotten; she describes “robins” (line 5) and how

And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,

If mankind perished utterly[.]

(lines 7–10)

The fear of oblivion is connected with the war.

Modernists also attempted to defy or deny death. In “Dirge without Music” (1928) Millay writes: “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground” (line 1). Seemingly, recognizing the inevitability of death contradicts her refusal to be “resigned.” Samuel argues that “all of the major historical works dedicated to the subject [of death] argue in some manner that denial of death is an important dimension of the twentieth-century American experience” (2013, p. xi). For the Puritans, God had ultimate power over death and people were expected to treat death as a divine mandate; even in the nineteenth century, acceptance of death was viewed as a sign of piety, but modernists were openly defiant. Refusing to forget seems to be a defiant act as well, albeit one that is ultimately futile because memory is imperfect. Millay also writes in “Dirge without Music,” “A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost” (line 8). Samuel argues that “the notion of one day disappearing is contrary to many of [America’s] defining cultural values,” and in particular “The rise of the self has made it increasingly difficult to acknowledge the fact that our individual selves will no longer exist” (2013, p. x), a fear reflecting the shift away from the Puritan self-abnegation that encouraged consecration of one’s life to God.

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) calls to mind both the war and the great influenza pandemic and depicts fear of death. The horror of death in the poem is heightened by the sheer number of dead: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many” (lines 62–63). The image of dust in the poem suggests the fear of oblivion in the promise to “show you fear in a handful of dust” (line 30). We might characterize fear of death as a particular hallmark of the modern era. Death cannot be controlled or mastered; it cannot be subdued by reason.

Modern poetry’s troubling images of rebirth reflected a contested boundary between life and death as well as attempted denial. The imagery of The Waste Land marks anxiety about manner of death and burial as well as a lack of resolution and the recurrence of troubled memories. The speaker in the first part of The Waste Land asks someone he recognizes among the dead “‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (1922, lines 71–72). The grotesque crowd of dead walking across London Bridge are not resting peacefully. The image of flowers growing from the ground (where the bodies are buried) also appears at the start of the poem: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land” (lines 1–2). The imagery parallels interest in immortality in the interwar period. Elizabeth Outka argues that the popularity of spiritualism in the United States surged in these years due to the pandemic as well as the war because both resulted in the loss of many lives as well as poor conditions for death and burial (2020, pp. 202–203).¹² She also argues that spiritualism was “about exploring the threshold between the living and the dead” (2020, p. 204). Samuel notes that scientists and doctors were also exploring this threshold: cloning research seemed to offer ways of maintaining life as some scientists proposed that “should a fatal disease or injury not come one’s way, we could potentially live forever” and the new medical understanding that the heart could beat when the person appeared dead—and a person could be sometimes revived even with no heartbeat—caused confusion, optimism, and also anxiety about how the moment of death ought to be defined (2013, pp. 18–19).

Memory in the period after World War I is also a theme of Carl Sandburg’s “Grass” (1918). Like The Waste Land, the poem alludes to the bodies of war: “Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo./Shovel them under and let me work—/I am the grass; I cover all” (lines 1–3). A tension between memory and forgetting exists as the threat of something below the ground which threatens to either break out or be covered. The grass’s covering of the horrors of war as part of a societal mourning process of moving on is simultaneously comforting and threatening, as forgetting dulls the sharp pain of war—yet the bodies are still there, nonetheless. Sandburg also develops the theme of memory in “Under the Harvest Moon” (1916), depicting “Death, the gray mocker” (line 5) “As a beautiful friend/Who remembers” (lines 7–8).

“By The Road to the Contagious Hospital” in Spring and All (1923) by William Carlos Williams appears to respond to some of the imagery of The Waste Land. Plants that seem dead come back to life:

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish

dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,

cold, uncertain of all

save that they enter. All about them

the cold, familiar wind—

(1923, pp. 12–13, lines 14–19)

Despite the overriding fixation upon (final, total) death, and an ultimate failure to find a satisfying source of comfort in grief, modern poetry—people in the modern era—were reticent to resign themselves to the idea that this life was all there is; instead, that idea prompted severe grief and denial. The poem’s images of rebirth are uncertain yet undeniable. As Williams notes in his prose that begins the volume, “The world is new” (1923, p.12). Modernists were often torn between acceptance and denial of death, and their poetry often wrestles with this tension.

The poets of the Harlem Renaissance engaged with death in some ways similar to those of other modernists, but their poems were also often shaped in part by the violence historically experienced by African Americans, and often linked with activism. Langston Hughes’ “Mazie Dies Alone in the City Hospital” (1928) is uniquely critical of the changes in how people died in the modern era: the speaker knows that it is wrong “[…] to die this way with the quiet/Over everything like a shroud” (lines 1–2) and observes that she would “rather die in the way [she] lived” (line 5). Hughes’ criticism of death trends shows some similarity to the ideas of the New Death, as well as a generally forward-looking awareness of what was wrong with how death was treated.

Meanwhile, Hughes’ “Dear Lovely Death” (1930) also suggests a more familiar approach to death than many modern poems. Hughes addresses Death as a friend: “Dear lovely Death/That taketh all things under wing—” (lines 1–2) and sees Death as a “change” (line 4) and a respite for “This suffering flesh” (line 6). Karla Holloway has written of how “the anticipation of death and dying figured into the experiences of black folk so persistently, given how much more omnipresent death was for them than for other Americans” (2002, p. 6). Additionally, the church remained prominent in African American life, and worked in conjunction with black funeral homes to provide a culturally distinct mode of mourning (Holloway 2002, pp.150–188), so the estrangement from both traditional religious beliefs and the funeral establishment may not have been experienced in exactly the same way in the African American community. Yet, religion remained a complex subject: in “Song for a Dark Girl” (1927), Hughes evokes a poetic tradition that viewed Christianity in part as a religion imposed upon the oppressed during slavery. The speaker views the lynched body of his lover and finds little comfort in a god who has allowed this cruel injustice:

Way Down South in Dixie

(Bruised body high in air)

I asked the white Lord Jesus

What was the use of prayer.

(lines 5–8)

Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” (1919) reacts defiantly against deadly racial oppression. McKay’s defiance is not about refusing to die but dictating the terms of death: “What though before us lies the open grave?/Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” (lines 12–14). McKay’s depiction of death is not the meaningless awful death of many white modernists, but evokes the infliction of racist violence. McKay’s “The Lynching” (1920) is less triumphant in tone, recounting not only a murder but also the lack of remorse shown by a crowd, including women observing the body: “[…] never a one/Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue” (lines 11–12). The white children who are present suggest that this violence may continue into the next generation: “And little lads, lynchers that were to be,/Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee” (lines 13–14). The violence of murder is compounded by the crowd’s dehumanizing attitude toward the deceased. Anissa Janine Wardi argues that in the African American pastoral, for example, the “black body is at once the enslaved body—lynched, maimed, tortured, and abused by white racism and its institutionalized powers—and the ancestral body, with its accompanying folk culture and practices, spirituality, community, and kinship networks” (2003, p. 11). In poems by McKay and Hughes, the treatment of the black body—like the treatment of the black body in the funeral¹³—takes on particular meaning, undergone with both familiarity and respect in a process that promotes and engages with antiracist activism.

During World War II (1939–1945) American poetry continued to present a bleak view of death. Poems from the World War II years continued many of the concerns of earlier twentieth-century poems. Modernist Mina Loy’s “On Third Avenue” (1942) suggests a comparison between human lives and the passing of figures on a trolley:

Transient in the dust,

the brilliancy

of a trolley

loaded with luminous busts;

lovely in anonymity

they vanish

with the mirage

of their passage.

(p. 110)

The familiar image of dust invites a comparison of the anonymity of the city with the anonymity found in death, while the passage of figures on a trolley suggests the brevity of life. In Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945), the speaker’s sacrifice of his life in war is gruesome and meaningless. He is sacrificed not only to the war effort but to the “State” (line 1), which depersonalizes his death inside the plane into a mechanical process. His body is not handled with respect: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose” (line 5). Death in this poem is not heroic, but horrific.

The age that had dawned in the decades following two world wars, the Holocaust, and the use of nuclear weaponry was shaped by uncertainty. Robert Lifton called this “a time of doubt about modes of continuity and connection […] at a time when the rate of historical velocity and the resulting psychohistorical dislocation had already undermined established symbols around the institutions of family, church, government, and education,” which Lifton described as a “loss of faith” in different “modes of symbolic immortality” (1973, p. 25). Anxiety about death was associated with increased medical and other efforts to prevent or delay it.¹⁴ In 1966, Robert Blauner observed that dying “at an age when their physical, social, and mental powers are at an ebb, or even absent, typically in the hospital, and often separated from family and other meaningful surroundings,” contrasted with previous eras (p. 49). We might connect these attitudes toward death with the images of rebirth in The Waste Land decades earlier, and consider the representation of desperation—in medical practice, poetic imagery—that resulted from the fear of death. It was not until the later decades of the twentieth century that various movements encouraging treating death with acceptance became more mainstream.

Yet, even in these decades poems reflect a tendency to seek comfort. A poem written in 1932 by Mary Elizabeth Frye (1905–2002) that gained popularity for use at funerals, “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep,”¹⁵ comforts the bereaved: “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” (Frye 1932, lines 10–12). The poem comfortingly imagines the deceased having become a part of nature and existing in some way outside the grave. Similarly, in “the rites for Cousin Vit” (1949), Gwendolyn Brooks imagines that the loved one is more than the body in the casket: “[…] But it can’t hold her,/That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her” (lines 2–3). Brooks imagines that her loved one “rises in the sunshine” (line 6).

Preceded by a centuries-long shift away from Puritan ideas about the afterlife and toward an emphasis on the body and this life, modernists wrestled with mortality and ultimately accepted death as inevitable and final except for the prospect of becoming part of the larger universe—a part of nature, or dust to dust. For many, this made mourning more intense because the deceased person was truly gone forever and there would be no reunion with loved ones in Heaven, but at the same time the fact that there is only this life made earthly existence all the more precious.