Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 3. TO ONE DEAD, by EDWARD CARPENTER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TOWARDS DEMOCRACY: PART 3. TO ONE DEAD, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: You must look at your own body lying dead there quiet calmly
Last Line: And even so it is only one of your similitudes.
Subject(s): Death; Dead, The


YOU must look at your own body lying dead there quite calmly—
[If you have ever loved and quietly surrendered that love you will
understand what I mean]—
The dear fingers and feet, the eyes you have looked in so often—they
are yours no longer;
You are not bound to them, you are something else than you thought.
Now you see that these things are only a similitude:
A new and wonderful life opens out—so wonderful, O so wonderful!

Those eyes whose answer once you forebore to ask for—do you remember
how after all, how wide and wonderful at last they opened upon you, shining up
for you (yes for you) from depths you saw not in them before?
And that body which now you have forsaken, so now for the first time do you
understand it and its life (all the old passages in it so clear, so real, so
wonderful, so transparent);
Now it radiates back upon you what you are—of whom it is only the
similitude;
And even so it is only one of your similitudes.





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