Dancing with Death
Five Poets and the Mystery of Being
October has a way of reminding us of our mortality. The days grow shorter, the light becomes golden, and the air has a hint of decay. At Halloween we see costumes, decorations, and candy, but underneath it all lies a more serious thought: one day, we'll die. It’s a bummer of a thought. It’s easy to push it away and try to ignore it. It’s difficult to more closer to it. Poetry offers an opportunity move closer to thoughts about death and gain new insight about our humanity.
The Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti had a way of saying a lot in a few lines. His poem “Eternity” encompasses all of life in only three lines:
Between a flower picked
and the other given
the inexpressible nothing.
It’s a small poem about a big idea. Between one act and the next, between giving and taking, life passes. The “inexpressible nothing” is not an emptiness but an all encompassing awareness of the gestures which make up our lives.
From Ungaretti's stillness and contemplation, we turn to motion. In his poem “Danse macabre,” the French poet Charles Baudelaire describes a ballroom filled with skeletons and perfume. A noble lady, long dead, twirls under the candlelight, her “deep-set eyes made of void and gloom.” Yet she dances as if she were alive. Baudelaire’s vision isn’t just decoration. It’s a sharp, playful reminder. No matter how fine our clothes or elegant our gestures, we all move to the same music. The poem suggests that beauty and decay accompany us on our journey, joined together in the dance.
Emily Dickinson leads us inward, where the dance becomes psychological. In her poem “I Felt a Funeral, in my Brain” she describes a ceremony taking place inside her own mind. The mourners tread, the drum beats, the “Plank in Reason” breaks and suddenly she is falling, endlessly, through her own mind. Dickinson reminds us that mortality isn’t just the loss of the body. It’s the moment when our mind itself dissolves. Her poem shows a journey from thought into mystery, from knowing into unknowing.
Edgar Allan Poe brings that mystery into the midnight hour. In his poem “The Raven,” a grieving man confronts the echo of his own despair. The bird’s relentless “Nevermore” becomes a kind of haunting reminder of grief and loss. Yet Poe’s poem isn’t only about loss. It’s also about a refusal to stop asking, to stop hoping, to stop knocking on the door of the unknown. The raven is both messenger and mirror, showing us the shadow that grief casts across the human heart.
Centuries before all of these poets, John Donne looked death in the face and laughed. His poem “Death Be Not Proud” issues a challenge to death:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so
Donne’s faith led him to look death in the face and taunt it. He refused to grant death the power it claims. In his poem, he compares death to sleep and says after our “one short sleepe,” we “wake eternally.” Donne turns death on its head: instead of death being an ending, it's a beginning. It’s not we who die, but death itself.
Together, the poets invite us to look beyond fear. Ungaretti finds eternity in a moment’s pause. Baudelaire turns decay into beauty. Dickinson listens as reason breaks apart. Poe turns grief into art. Donne sees death as a doorway to eternity.
In my book Wishing To Be Human, the final two poems linger in a space between being and nothingness. They consider eternity, beauty, and loss. The poems ask, as each of these poets do, what it means to live knowing that we will grow old and face death. The answer isn’t denying death's reality, but in embracing our humanity.
