What then remains but that we still should cry
Not to be born, or, being born, to die?
Memorial Day Quotes
This page is assembled from three others: War, Death and Gratitude. There is no memorial collection underneath it. One poem is filed against the day itself, Joyce Kilmer’s, in Trees and Other Poems (1914), and it opens with a bugle that, he says, is not singing of war today.
The rest is whatever the three source pages rate highest, so it leans toward poetry and toward writers who saw war up close. Several famous lines about death and sacrifice carry flags here, so read the note on a quote’s own page before you attach a name to it.
Early, bright, transient, chaste as morning dew,
She sparkled, was exhal'd and went to heaven.
[Words he used to refuse heart surgery the day before he passed away.]
The sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd,
Hath op'd his ponderous and marble jaws.
Graves they say are warm'd by glory;
Foolish words and empty story.
This is the field and Acre of our God,
This is the place where human harvests grow!
Kings have no such couch as thine,
As the green that folds thy grave.