Death song

“ Friends and relatives are gathered about the dead; even children are not excluded from paying this last honor to the departed. The windows are closed, and in the gloom tapers and candles are burning before the images of the saints and over the flower-covered body, while the smoke of the incense and the fragrance of the wreaths fill the air. Yet somehow in the verses of the song one catches the moving sounds of mourning humanity, the image of death against life. ”

“ A wondrous song,
Rank with sea smells and the keen lust of life;
Echoing with battle trumpets, and the moan
Of dying men in reeking hospitals;
Thrilling all through with human pity and love
And crying courage in the face of doom;—
With all its love of life still praising death
Enchantingly, as death was never praised;
And with high anger and a god-like scorn
Passionately proclaiming life in death
And the unquenched, immortal soul of man—
A wondrous song,
Trembling with unshed tears and life's full joy,
Burst the tense meshes of the critic's web
And sang itself into eternal day. ”

“ For mine own grief I knew not, nor had heart
Therewith to bear my part
And set my songs to sorrow; nor to hear
How tear by sacred tear
Fell from her eyes as flowers or notes that fall
In some slain feaster's hall
Where in mid music and melodious breath
Men singing have seen death.
So fair, so lost, so sweet she knelt; or so
In our lost eyes below
Seemed to us sorrowing ”

“ An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young—
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.
"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
"And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her—that she died!
"How shall the ritual, then, be read?—the requiem how be sung
"By you—by yours, the evil eye,—by yours, the slanderous tongue
"That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"
Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong! ”

“ Mystery and rhythm, those two essential elements of every cult were scattered everywhere. Men and women continually expressed their soul in song, accompanied by song all their labors under roof and heaven, celebrated by song both life and death. Around the cradles and around the biers, music was shed, slow and persistent, very ancient, as ancient, perhaps, as the race whose profound sorrows they manifested. Sad, grave, fixed in immutable rhythm, they seemed the fragments of hymns that had belonged to the immemorial liturgies which had survived the destruction of some great primordial myth. ”

“ That in the end we turn to thee, Death, That we turn to thee, singing One last song.
O Death, Thou art an healing wind That blowest over white flowers A-tremble with dew; [Pg 41] Thou art a wind flowing Over long leagues of lonely sea; Thou art the dusk and the fragrance; Thou art the lips of love mournfully smiling; Thou art the pale peace of one Satiate with old desires; Thou art the silence of beauty, And we look no more for the morning ”

“ SONG Come away, come away, death. And in sad cypress let me be laid; Fly away, fly away, breath; I am slain by a fair cruel maid. My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, O, prepare it! My part of death no one so true Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet, On my black coffin let there be strown: Not a friend, not a friend greet My poor corpse where my bones shall be thrown: A thousand thousand sighs to save, Lay me, O, where Sad true lover never find my grave, To weep there! ”

“ I’ll smooth it with hope, and I’ll cheer it with song.
The tune is related to ‘Be Gone Unbelief’, in this collection, and to the worldly tunes listed under that song. Negro adoptions of the tune are Marsh, pp. 144 and 173, and SS 33.
No. 74
TO DIE NO MORE, GOS 363 Pentatonic, mode 3 (I II III — V VI —)
play
My heav’nly home is bright and fair,
No pain nor death can enter there;
Its glitt’ring tow’rs the sun outshine,
I hope that mansion shall be mine.
Chorus
I’m going home to Christ above,
I’m going to the Christian’s rest,
To die no more to, die no more,
I’m going home to die no more. ”

“ Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb. ”

“ He composes, for this purpose, what they call the song of death, a song which he is to sing when he has fallen into the hands of his enemies, and is expiring under the tortures which they inflict upon him. ”

“ When wearied and wounded to death he sinks down there; once more is heard completed, as if 'twere ghostly tones from the far off unapproachable distance, that dream-like melody for the first time ringing out full and perfect in death, and the notes fade and die softly, as the life-blood ebbs away. ”

“ All that the funeral train of an entire nation weeping its own ruin and death can be imagined to feel of desolating woe, of majestic sorrow, wails in the musical ringing of this passing bell, mourns in the tolling of this solemn knell, as it accompanies the mighty escort on its way to the still city of the Dead. ”

“ "'MID YOUTH AND SONG, FEASTING AND CARNIVAL, THROUGH LAUGHTER, THROUGH THE ROSES, AS OF OLD COMES DEATH, ON SHADOWY AND RELENTLESS FEET, DEATH, UNAPPEASABLE BY PRAYER OR GOLD; DEATH IS THE END, THE END!" Proud, then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greet Death as a friend! ”

“ Snatched from the sightless faces of the dead,
Hoodwink the world, and keep the mourner bowed
In dust, real dust, with stones, real stones, for bread;
Lest, as you look one eighth of an inch beneath
The yellow skin of death,
You dream yourselves discoverers of the skull
That old memento mori of our faith;
Lest it be you who hunt a flying wraith
Through this dissolving stuff of hill and cloud;
Lest it be you, who, at the last, annul
Your covenant with your kind;
Lest it be you who darken heart and mind,
Sell the strong soul in bondage to a dream,
And fetter us once more to things that seem. ”

“ With heaving breast and many a burning tear,
I felt with holy joy a world reveal'd.
Gay sports and festive hours proclaim'd with joyous pealing,
This Easter hymn in days of old;
And fond remembrance now doth me, with childlike feeling,
Back from the last, the solemn step, withhold.
O still sound on, thou sweet celestial strain!
The tear-drop flows,—Earth, I am thine again!
CHORUS OF DISCIPLES He whom we mourned as dead,
Living and glorious,
From the dark grave bath fled,
O'er death victorious;
Almost creative bliss
Waits on his growing powers;
Ah! Him on earth we miss ”

“ Where was the dream that burned his brain like fire? Even a dream grows grey at last and falls. He opened his book once more, beside the window, And read the printed words upon that page. The sunlight touched his hand; his eyes moved slowly, The quiet words enchanted time and age. 'Death is never an ending, death is a change; Death is beautiful, for death is strange; Death is one dream out of another flowing; Death is a chorded music, softly going By sweet transition from key to richer key. ”

“ It is upon the looker-on only—not upon the victim who is smitten down—that the battle-axe of Death casts a flash of light. It is with the death-bell as with other bells; it is those who are at a distance who hear the solemn, inspiring boom and music—not those who are within the sounding hemisphere. ”

“ Death, who, bursting from his sunless home, mouldy with the dew of darkness, springs upon the unwary traveler, and bears him swiftly to the spirit land—this Death, walking with ceaseless tread along his dismal pathway, has a strange and, to us, uncanny taste for music. ”

“ This reminiscent love-music gives way to the Death March, which, from a purely structural point of view, is an epitome of much that is salient in the musical investiture of the entire tetralogy, yet in spirit is a veritable apotheosis, a marvellously eloquent proclamation of antique grief and heroic sorrow. ”

“ When the thunder booms we seem to hear the angel's trumpet calling the dead to judgment, and in the lightning's flash, which cometh out of the east and appeareth even unto the west, we are reminded of the coming of the Son of man. In the midst of life there is death; the grave is dug by the cradle's side, and the mother's lullaby is but the prelude to the funeral dirge. And when life shall have merged into death, time into eternity, then, as the Scripture says: " The worldlings shall have slept their sleep and awakening shall find nothing in their hands." ”

“ Death seems not to have touched that face, pale though it be—life-like is the waving of those gentle hands—and the soft, sweet, low music which now we hear, steals not sure from lips hushed by the burial-mould! ”

“ Of all the sparkling kisses that they gave
Spangling a secret radiance on adoring hands,
Now stifled in the darkness of a grave
With kiss of loneliness and death's embracing bands.
No more!—And we, the mourners, dare not wear
The black that folds our hearts in secrecy of pain,
But must don purple and bright standards bear,
Vermilion of our honour, a bloody train.
We dare not weep who must be brave in battle—
"Another death—another day—another inch of land—
The dead are cheering and the ghost drums rattle" ...
The dead are deaf and dumb and cannot understand.... ”

“ His eyes with the hollow sockets stare round with an empty chillness.
He bears a scythe in his hands. It is Death with his icy message.
Clutching the bulky book, the host is in peaceful slumber,
When Death draws near to him softly, and peacefully near him lingers. ”

“ What sobs, what prayers of mourners do I hear?
What mean those tapers pale, that chanted knell?
Dost thou, O Death, thus whisper in mine ear
For the last time? On the grave's brink I break
My earthly slumbers; and to life awake!
2.
Soul, spark most precious of a flame divine,
Immortal dweller in a frame that dies,
Hush these alarms: for freedom shall be thine. ”

“ So I sang again; for the longing had grown into a passionate need of seeing her alive—
“Or art thou Death, O woman? for since I Have set me singing by thy side, Life hath forsook the upper sky, And all the outer world hath died. “Yea, I am dead; for thou hast drawn My life all downward unto thee. Dead moon of love! let twilight dawn: Awake! and let the darkness flee. “Cold lady of the lovely stone! ”

“ In the middle, a music-master teaching a lady the lute, Death near them holding a violin and music-book. On the left, in another apartment, Death in a dancing attitude, with a double bagpipe, leads an aged [Pg 200] man with a rosary in his left hand, and leaning on a staff with his right. At bottom, three stanzas of French verses, beginning “La Mort qui n’a point d’oreilles.”
A very small wood print, that seems to have belonged to some English book, about 1600. It represents Death behind a female, who sees his reflected image in a mirror which she holds, instead of her own. ”

“ And music soft,’ and poison dying out of the green things, and cruelty out of all living things, and even the toads and efts becoming beautiful, and at last Time being borne ‘to his tomb in eternity.’ [80]
This beauty, this divine order, whereof all things shall become a part in a kind of resurrection of the body, is already visible to the dead and to souls in ecstasy, for ecstasy is a kind of death. ”

“ A grave man, knowing what steps of men keep truest time to the chanting of Death. Having grave friends also;—the same singing heard far off, it seems to me, or, perhaps, even low in the room, by that family of Sir Thomas More; or mingling with the hum of bees in the meadows outside the towered wall of Basle; or making the words of the book more tuneable, which meditative Erasmus looks upon. Nay, that same soft Death-music is on the lips even of Holbein’s Madonna. ”

“ Thou wilt have helped my soul from Death
The second Death, that never dies,
That cannot die, when time is dead:
Live Death, wherein the lost soul cries,
Eternally uncomforted.
Dark Angel, with thine aching lust! ”

“ It may have sounded consolatory to mature mourners, singers and hearers in the days when religious emotion habitually took a sad key, but its wild and thrilling chords made children weep. The tune is long out of use—though, strange to say, one of the most recent hymnals prints the hymn with a new minor tune.
Why do we mourn departed friends,
Or shake at death's alarms? 235 / 195
'Tis but the voice that Jesus sends
To call them to His arms.
Are we not tending upward too
As fast as time can move?
Nor should we wish the hours more slow
To keep us from our Love. ”

“ Play the great funeral march, music as profound as death. That will express our sorrow—that will voice our love, our hope, and that will tell of the life, the triumph, the genius, the death of Anton Seidl.
A TRIBUTE TO DR. THOMAS SETON ROBERTSON. New York September 8, 1898.
IN the pulseless hush of death, silence seems more expressive, more appropriate—than speech. In the presence of the Great Mystery, the great mystery that waits to enshroud us all, we feel the uselessness of words. ”

“ At each extremity of this division is a figure of Death sitting on a monument. The verses, in double columns, are placed between two borders with compartments. That on the right a scull crowned with a mitre; an angel with a censer; time carrying off a female on his back; Death with an infant in his arms; Death on horseback with a flag; Death wrestling with a man. The border on the left has a scull with a regal crown; an angel dancing with a book; Death carrying off an old man; Death leading a child; Death with a naked corpse; Death digging a grave. ”

“ And the trumpet's fierce impatience
Scatter strange reverberations
Thro' the graves of buried nations.
Death and Nature will stand stricken
When the hollow bones shall quicken
And the air with weeping thicken. ”

“ I will lie down under a juniper-bush and starve myself to death. You must come to my funeral. Oh, that will be beautiful! Now just pay attention; I know a beautiful verse:
“‘What my love for you is, have you known? There is on the heath a grave all alone; In it a poor dead poet is sleeping, To whom his love has brought much weeping; He sleeps and sleeps in his sombre grave, But sleeps not away the grief love gave. At midnight go to the grave on the heath, And wait till he again shall breathe ”