Bereavement Poems record the grief felt after the loss of a family member or friend or express sympathy about another’s loss. In the nineteenth century when many children died in infancy one often finds poets writing about a mother who has lost her child, as in Henry Parkes’s ‘A Mother’s Grief’. Robert Crawford’s ‘Bereavement’ also expresses sympathy on the death of a child, while in ‘Anniversary’ Dorothy Hewett looks back at the impact on her of the death of her young son. In ‘Lament on Deaths in Infancy’ Philip Salom writes more generally about the grief still occasioned by such tragic events.
Often, too, bereavement poems record the grief of a son or daughter at the loss of their father or mother. In Anthony Lawrence’s ‘The Custodian of Grief and Wonder’ we see a father’s death from the point of view of a young child as he holds the urn containing his father’s ashes. Peter Rose’s moving ‘Ladybird’ records the experiences of losing both his father and his brother. In his poetic sequence ‘Sky was Sky’ Michael Brennan also attempts to come to terms with the sudden and unexpected loss of one of his brothers. Diane Fahey, in another poetic sequence, ‘A Death in the City’ describes the death and burial of one of her uncles who has died before his time.
Bereavement poems can also be written to express the grief felt at the loss of friends, as with Peter Porter’s ‘Addio Senza Rancor’, which looks back at two girls in a school photo, both now dead in their forties. In ‘Artist to Widow’, Alex Skovron describes the transformation in the life of a musician who has lost her husband, while in ‘Loss’ Nicolette Stasko writes about the way the world appears to someone undergoing the deep sense of grief which follows a bereavement.
Bereavement poems are written to express sympathy on a person's deat