Corpse

“ And the worms' gnawing, and thy body's rottenness,
And the rottenness in thy bones and in thy brain!
1st Corpse.
O beautiful, O dead, O spit upon,
He speaketh well that is but lately dead;
Thy flesh lies all along thee like green slime,
O pudding gravied in thine own dead sauce!
2nd Corpse.
Rotten one!
1st Corpse.
Dung-heap!
2nd Corpse.
Dead one!
1st Corpse.
Beast! beast! beast!
Therefore perhaps, thou art so early dead?
2nd Corpse.
They say that those thou lovedst were not men,
O goat-face—Shall I say what was thy death?
4th Corpse. ”

“ The twitching lips press lightly on the forehead of the dying,
The breath ceases and the pulse of the heart ceases,
The corpse stretches on the bed and the living look upon it,
It is palpable as the living are palpable.
The living look upon the corpse with their eyesight,
But without eyesight lingers a different living and looks curiously on the corpse.
3
To think the thought of death merged in the thought of materials,
To think of all these wonders of city and country, and others taking great interest in them, and we taking no interest in them. ”

“ Bones, nerves, and veins, and flesh, are covered in
By this opaque transparency of skin,
Precisely that we should not see within.
The corpse is hid, that Death may work its vile
Corruption in black secrecy; the while
Our saddest graves with grass and fair flowers smile. ”

“ I screamed, screamed in utter horror at the thing I saw there. Dead? Good God, I do not know. It was a corpse, a dead human body, standing before me like some propped-up thing from the grave. A face half eaten away, terrible in its leering grin. Twisted mouth, with only a suggestion of lips, curled back over broken teeth. Hair—writhing, distorted—like a mass of moving, bloody coils. ”

“ There was a youthful forehead under the brown hair, an almost indignant knitting of the eyebrows, pinched nostrils, closed eyelids, the lashes glued together by the rime, and from the corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth extended a channel of frozen tears. The snow lighted up the corpse. Winter and death are not unlike; the corpse is a human circle. ”

“ Where the sun is.
2nd Corpse.
O foolish ragged-bones,
Wouldst thou show forth thy dripping excrements,
And shredded rottenness to the face of day?—
Stink and be still, and leave us here in peace.
1st Corpse.
Envy me not, O stench, slop-face, dung-eyes;
My bones are clean and dry as the tomb's walls,
And stink not; as for thee, thou art a sink.
2nd Corpse.
Envy me not, thou, that I am so sweet
The black worms love me; hungry were that worm
That on thee preys.
4th Corpse.
Be silent, both ye dead and rotten things ”

“ Hence it is that nobody has depicted its contrasts in stronger relief, nor as visibly shown the decay and bloom of life at one time the dull flabby corpse, a genuine clinical mass, empty of blood and substance, livid, blue and mottled through suffering, a clot of blood on the mouth, the eye glassy and the feet and hands clayish, swollen and deformed because death seized them first ”

“ A corpse lies bounding in a hearse,
And friends and relatives disperse,
And are not stirred.
Those living dead up in their rooms
Must note how partial are the tombs,
That take men back into their wombs
While theirs must fast. ”

“ Death does not reveal the secrets of life. A corpse riding post fills me with horror; bones, bleached and light, are easily moved: they will be less fatigued by this last journey than when I dragged them hither and thither, laden with the burden of my cares. ”

“ The voice sinks into a whisper——the pulse leaves the wrist, and gradually the heart ceases to beat——a blueish lividity is over the body——the nose pinched, and the eye-balls' sink deep into the sockets, and sometimes, previous to death, the patient has all the appearance of a living corpse. ”

“ The corpse lies on its back on the floor, its silk nightgown covered with blood. The faithful old servant, smitten down and bleeding copiously, is faintly crying for help. Close at hand is the epileptic, in the midst of a fearful convulsion. ”

“ He sees a corpse and thinks of it as a corpse; I see a corpse and behold sleep rather than death. And as in regard to books, both learned persons and unlearned see them with the same eyes, but not with the same understanding—for to the unlearned the mere shapes of letters appear, while the learned discover the sense that lies within those letters ”

“ Most of the instances on record, and particularly those from lay journals, are vivid exaggerations, drawn from possibly such a trivial sign as a corpse found with the fist tightly clenched or the face distorted, which are the inspiration of the horrible details of the dying struggles of the person in the coffin. ”

“ Gradually, as she recovered from the stunning effects of her fall, and her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom around her, the "thing" on the ground shaped itself into the form of a human being—but of a human being so still and motionless, that it seemed probable it was a corpse already. ”

“ The corpse is at rest within the tomb:
We begin in what we end. ”

“ The organs of sense are destroyed, and the intellectual operations dependent on them have perished with their sources. How can a corpse see or feel? its eyes are eaten out, and its heart is black and without motion. ”

“ The corpse is not the whole animal; there is still something that appertains to it, still a corner-stone, and in this case, as in every other, a very chief corner-stone—life, the spirit that makes everything beautiful. ”

“ So I made a big fire in the fireplace and got the shack good and hot, then went out and brought in the corpse. I got sick at the stomach on that job, but that was the only way. I didn’t have the heart to leave the thing outside and build a fire over it out there. I try to respect the dead, even if the corpse is that of a man who had been dead several thousand years and looked more like an animal than a human being. ”

“ If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs. ”

“ When the corpse is brought, they first extract the brain through the nostrils with an iron. Then, after extracting the entrails, they wash the body with wine, and again cleanse it with pounded perfumes. ”

“ Where tears are falling while the bell is knelling,
With all the dark solemnities which show
That Death is in the dwelling!
O very, very dreary is the room
Where Love, domestic Love, no longer nestles,
But, smitten by the common stroke of doom,
The Corpse lies on the trestles! ”

“ More dead perhaps than He, than the other Man, whose corpse I see, I persist in seeing there inside its coffin ... a terribly wasted corpse, frightfully decomposed. More dead than He, because He does not know that He is dead ”

“ If a corpse stiffens shortly after death, all is thought to proceed naturally; but if the limbs remain flexible, some one of the family is shortly to follow. If the eyes of a corpse are difficult to close, it is said “they are looking after a follower.” ”

“ He looked at it, and exclaimed in surprise, for instead of the dead man alone, there were three figures upon the negative, a very good portrait of the corpse, and on either side a man and a woman, their faces growing more distinct as they looked. ”

“ The leprous corpse, touched by this spirit tender,
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath;
Like incarnations of the stars, when splendour
Is changed to fragrance, they illumine death _175
And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath;
Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath
By sightless lightning?—the intense atom glows
A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose. ”

“ Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm. ”

“ I see a gleaming light,
Oh say, what may it be?”
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he. ”

“ And when all possible correspondences have ceased, when the nerves decline to respond to any stimulus, when the lungs close their gates against the air, when the heart refuses to correspond with the blood by so much as another beat, the insensate corpse is wholly and forever dead. ”

“ The physicians, who visited the corpse from time to time, and who always deposed, that there could be nothing of natural in what they saw, judged, that the blood which came from a body deprived of heat, and issued from a part so distant from the heart as is the foot, could be no other than the effect of a celestial virtue ”

“ If our gaze were turned upon the earth during its night period, its body would appear like a corpse. For it consists to a great extent of the decaying bodies of those human beings whose souls are in another state of existence. ”

“ OF old, the spoils of death fell to the anatomist's share, while the physiologist took for his part the phenomena of life. Now we submit the corpse to the same experiments as the living organism, and pry into the relics of death for the secrets of life. Instead of seeing in the lifeless body mere forms ready to dissolve and vanish, we detect in it forces and persisting activities full of deep instructiveness in their mode of working. ”

“ From the time of death until burial, the corpse lies on the floor of the house, with no other covering than it had in life. In the present case a man, a near relative, was seen lying across the corpse, which he hugged and stroked, with loud crying and bitter sobbing. ”

“ Enter a Funeral on the right.
Here, sir—it's you I'm addressing—the defunct;
Do you care to carry a few traps to Hades?
The Corpse (sitting up) .
How heavy?
Dionysus.
⁠What you see.
Corpse. ”

“ They see themselves in thought pale, rigid, insentient, and follow the fate of their corpse in every detail at least up to interment or cremation, and some cannot resist a rather strong imaginative experience as to how their living sentient body would feel the rigidity, the cold, the treatment to which it is subjected, the gazing of friends, a custom which some interdict. ”

“ There is no reason, which compels me to maintain that a body does not die, unless it becomes a corpse; ”

“ On these occasions they vanish, but presently appear again behind the observer, and hold on their course. If a little candle is seen, of a pale or bluish colour, then follows the corpse, either of an abortive, or some infant; if a large one, then the corpse of some one come to age. ”

“ BODY. Synonyms:
Body denotes the entire physical structure, considered as a whole, of man or animal; form looks upon it as a thing of shape and outline, perhaps of beauty; frame regards it as supported by its bony framework; system views it as an assemblage of many related and harmonious organs. Body, form, frame, and system may be either dead or living; clay and dust are sometimes so used in religious or poetic style, tho ordinarily these words are used only of the dead. Corpse and remains are used only of the dead. Corpse is the plain technical word for a dead body still retaining its unity ”

“ The body is placed under the earth, and after a certain period there remains no vestige even of its form. This is that contemplation of inexhaustible melancholy, whose shadow eclipses the brightness of the world. The common observer is struck with dejection of the spectacle. He contends in vain against the persuasion of the grave, that the dead indeed cease to be. The corpse at his feet is prophetic of his own destiny. Those who have preceded him, and whose voice was delightful to his ear; whose touch met his like sweet and subtle fire; ”

“ A flesh-wound may be healed, a bone may be set, it may knit and grow vigorous again; but you must not puncture the heart, nor attempt to change the natural channels of the circulating blood, under the penalty of having a corpse on your hands. ”

“ How did He express those that are dead in the flesh? “They who are in the graves,” whose corpses lie buried, whose ashes are covered up, whose bones are dispersed, whose flesh is flesh no more, and yet is entire to God. ”

“ O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray,
To come to me: of cureless ills thou art
The one physician. Pain lays not its touch
Upon a corpse. ”

“ Corpse enfolding corpse he lies;1240 he hath won his nuptial rites, poor youth, not here, yet in the halls of Death; and he hath witnessed to mankind that, of all curses which cleave to man, ill counsel is the sovereign curse. ”