Cross Pollination

I’m posting ten of my favorite ED poems about death and grief, and today’s entry will take a few twists and turns to include lines by Robert Frost, William Shakespeare and Elton John’s lyricist, Bernie Taupin.

Today’s poem by Dickinson is "Apparently with no surprise," an unforgiving poem about the facts of life.  The image where “The Sun proceeds unmoved / To measure off another Day” reminds me of “Out, out,” Robert Frost’s poem about the death of a boy, which concludes, “No more to build on there. And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”

To the right and below I’ve posted Dickinson’s poem and Frost’s poem, and just FYI:  Frost’s poem was written in response to a newspaper article he’d read about the death of a sixteen-year-old boy.  The story, from the March 31, 1910, edition of The Littleton Courier of Littleton, New Hampshire, is also posted below.

And this is wild:  in exploring all of this, I also found info related to the young man’s gravesite; that's his tombstone pictured at the right; click HERE for info.

By the way, the title of Frost’s poem is an allusion to a line in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” but not “Out, out – damned spot.”  Lady Macbeth actually says, “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!”  No, Frost’s “out, out” comes from Macbeth’s soliloquy, “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow” – and I’ve posted that below as well.

And this is where Elton John and Bernie Taupin come in:  Shakespeare’s “Out, out, brief candle!” always makes me think of Elton John’s hit about Marilyn Monroe, “Candle in the Wind” – a song they re-worked and re-titled as “Goodbye England’s Rose” for Princess Diana’s funeral.

Of course, the blonde casualties from two renditions of Elton John’s song bring me back to the “blonde assassin” in Dickinson’s poem.

Do all of these lines call to mind any other poems or songs for you?