‘Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note As his corse to the rampart we hurried.’ So begins a memorable poem on the death of Sir John Moore at Corunna. Moore was a commander of the Rifles, was killed in the Peninsular War after a gruelling retreat from the French forces and was buried in haste. A poem by Charles Wolfe commemorates the event. It is a celebrated poem, the only one of Wolfe’s that is remembered.
In a poem called ‘Toril’ Roy Campbell lets us overhear a conversation taking place between a bull (about to go into the arena and to his death) and an ox. ‘My being,’’ says the ox, ‘is confederate with pain. Mine to endure as yours is to complain.’ The bull asks what can be blacker than the death he will die at the hand of the matador. ‘More hideous than this martyrdom?’ he demands. From the ox comes the answer ‘The yoke!’
‘Your father’s gone, my bald headmaster said. Edward Lucie-Smith’s poem ‘The Lesson’ records the tears, but not just tears of grief. Tears might have their uses. They could bind a bully’s fist for a week or two. He cried for shame, then for relief. He was ten years old.
Charles Causley, in ‘Death of a Poet’ notices the progress of a funeral. ‘The parson boomed like a dockyard gun at a christening. Somebody read from the bible. It seemed hours.’ It brought back to him their service together in the Atlantic. (Causley served as an ordinary seaman in WW2.) ‘I went across the road to the pub, wrote this.’
Emily Dickinson teases the reader with lines like: ‘Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.’ She invites a reader to ponder the mystery and the enforced experience of peering into eternity.
To bring together 1 Corinthians 15 and a close acquaintance with death is no easy task. The frayed ends of faith and the questions that beset a secular outlook make such moments heavy and forbidding. But the confidence that death is not the end of the matter and that Jesus rose from the dead is ours if we choose it to be so.
BELT-TIGHTENING
Despite a £15,000 loss arising from the pandemic precautions, there will be no belt-tightening measures affecting the church’s mission programme, says Steve Prior, Rector of St Mary’s, Rushden. He writes in the July/August issue of ‘Grapevine’, the newsy 32-page magazine.
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