A Dream Of Death

by William Butler Yeats — a poem card from Justes Mots

The speaker dreams of a woman who dies alone in a foreign land, buried with little ceremony—just a wooden cross and cypress trees by indifferent stars. The poem mourns not only her death but her isolation and abandonment, inscribed with a final tribute to her beauty. It serves those grieving distant or abandoned losses.

I Dreamed that one had died in a strange place
Near no accustomed hand,
And they had nailed the boards above her face,
The peasants of that land,
Wondering to lay her in that solitude,
And raised above her mound
A cross they had made out of two bits of wood,
And planted cypress round;…

Themes: sympathy · grief · reflection