Scrittura Wednesday Poetry Prompt
Bells of Hell
necropoetics
The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me:
Oh! Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?
Oh! Grave, thy victory?
If you meet the undertaker,
Or the young man from the Pru,
Get a pint with what’s left over,
Now I’ll say good-bye to you.
(Brendan Behan’s version of a satirical World War I song. The original verses borrow from I Corinthians 15:55–58 in the third and fourth lines.)
We all face it, sooner or later. We may shut our eyes or keep them wide open, but it must be dealt with. Inevitably, it deals with us.
Death. There are more poems about it than one could shake a stick at, which is just a well; shaking a stick at death poems can be a frustrating undertaking. (I take it back; there are those who enjoy shaking sticks at writings of any variety, for whatever reasons.)
Donald Hall writes compellingly of “necropoems” in his New Yorker article: The Poetry of Death. He says, “When death, as public as a President or as private as a lover, overwhelms us, it speaks itself in elegy’s necropoetics.”
