“Unable are the loved to die — For Love is Immortality —”
The poem treats love as a form of continuity that resists the finality of physical death.
Opening lines.
“Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Another person’s loss is not completely separate from us because human lives participate in a shared condition.
Meditation XVII; modernized capitalization.
“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.”
Death becomes continuity with nature rather than simple disappearance, connecting mortality with renewal, earth, and the lives that follow.
Leaves of Grass (1855), untitled first-edition poem later known as “Song of Myself,” printed page 56 (Wikisource scan page 62). The line belongs to the poem’s final movement, later numbered section 52; the 1855 record remains tied to the unnumbered first edition rather than inheriting later section structure.
“Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.”
Death is framed as significant rather than unnoticed, offering a religious language of value and remembrance around the loss of a faithful person.
Psalm 116:15, King James Version; the statement appears within a psalm of deliverance, gratitude, and devotion.
“’Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.”
Love can remain worth having even when it ends in loss, because avoiding grief by avoiding attachment would also remove the relationship itself.
In Memoriam A.H.H., Canto XXVII, closing stanza; represented by the Wikisource canto transcription and independently visible on printed page 44 / scan leaf 64 of a public-domain edition. Tennyson's 'loved and lost' conclusion belongs to the elegy's grief for Arthur Hallam and its argument that love remains valuable despite bereavement; it is poetry, not a clinical grief prescription.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
The line emphasizes impermanence and the dreamlike brevity of human life.
Act 4, Scene 1.
“Jesus wept.”
The shortest sentence records grief without explanation or denial, showing sorrow as compatible with love, presence, and compassion in the face of death.
John 11:35, King James Version; Jesus weeps shortly before the raising of Lazarus, within a scene of mourning and bereavement.
