Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 62: Death, the Friend.

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About This Book

A collection of verse that shifts between brisk depictions of modern life—motor races and city heat—and intimate lyrical sonnets exploring love, memory, and devotional longing. Classical and medieval references recur alongside pagan pastoral fantasies that imagine escape to woodland Hesperides, while formal experiments include songs, sonnets, ballades, rondeaux and a pantoum. A seasonal sequence maps moods across spring to winter, and a concluding suite treats mortality through elegy and dark humor. The poems balance energetic narrative scenes with reflective, sometimes elegiac meditations on desire, nature, and death.

Death, the Friend.

FULL long these dreary weeks of dule I spend

On this my narrow bed of bitter pain.

Alike to me are sunshine, cloud or rain,

The day’s beginning or its sombre end;

Even sleep itself doth little comfort lend,

For in vast dreams the torment comes again

Vague and distorted by my feverish brain

Until I wake and long for Death the Friend.

Death! I do fear that empty, breathless Night

Thou bringest, not the sweat and agony,

The struggling breath, the terror or the sight

Of Earth and all my being leaving me;

For couldst thou promise an awakening—

Then, Death, enfold me with thy shadowy wing!...