We do lie beneath the grass
In the moonlight, in the shade
Of the yew-tree. They that pass
Hear us not. We are afraid
They would envy our delight,
In our graves by glow-worm night.
Come follow us, and smile as we;
We sail to the rock in the ancient waves,
Where the snow falls by thousands into the sea,
And the drown’d and the shipwreck’d have happy graves.
Dirge
Summary
In Dirge, Thomas Lovell Beddoes crafts a lyrical voice from beyond the grave, where the dead lie peacefully under moonlight and yew trees, hidden from the living. The poem is a melancholic invitation to join them—free from earthly pain—amid glow-worms and silent delight. It ends with a striking, surreal image of drowned souls and shipwrecks resting contentedly in deep, snow-flecked seas. Beddoes, a master of macabre Romanticism, conjures a vision of death not as horror, but as a strange, alluring peace.
