Death

Death

1. Porhyria's Lover

   • uniting power
     • 'I, its love, am gained instead!'
     • 'thus we sit together now/ And all night long we have not stirred'
   • women never really die
     • 'I propped her head up as before'

2. My Last Duchess

   • women never really die/immortalised in art
     • 'that's my last Duchess painted on the wall/ Looking as if she were alive'
     • 'there she stands/ As if alive'

3. Bishop Orders his Tomb

   • importance of legacy
     • 'and so, about this tomb of mine'
     • 'did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black -/ 'Twas ever antique-black I meant'
     • (promise of mistresses now he has St Praxed's ear )'that's if ye carve my epitaph aright'
   • immortalised in art
     • 'I shall lie through centuries'
     • 'I fold my arms.../Stretch my feet forth.../Let the bedclothes...drop/Into great laps and folds of sculptor's work'

4. Toccata of Galuppi's

   • nature of death
     • 'Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions - 'Must we die?'
     • "Life might last! We can but try!"
     • 'Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned'
     • 'the soul, doubtless, is immortal - where a soul can be discerned'
     • death personified
       • 'Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun'
   • next life is for the cultivated
     • 'mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree'
     • 'As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop'
     • 'Dear dead women, with such hair too - what's become of all the gold'

5. A Grammarian's Funeral

   • next life is for the cultivated
     • 'Actual life comes next? Patience a moment!'
     • 'What's time? Leave now for dogs and apes!/ Man has forever'
     • 'heaven's success/Found, or earth's failure'
     • 'Leave him - still loftier than the world suspects/Living and dying'

6. Apparent Failure

   • immortalised in art
     • 'the dead house where you show your drowned'
     • 'so killed themselves: and now, enthroned'
   • next life
     • 'their sin's atoned'
     • 'after Last, returns the First'
       • echoes Matthew 12:45

7. Prospice

   • nature of death
     • 'Fear death?-- to feel the fog in my throat/The mist in my face'
     • 'the strong man must go/For the journey is done'
     • 'No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers/The heroes of old'
   • death personified
     • 'Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form'
   • next life
     • 'though a battle's a fight...the reward of it all'
     • 'O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again'

8. Dubiety

   • women never really die
     • 'let gauziness shade, not shroud.../Dim and not deaden'
     • 'A dream? No dream, more real by much'