Funeral Poems

Poems families actually use: short ones that fit on the back of a prayer card, longer ones to read aloud at the service, and a note on which ones you can safely reprint. Every poem printed here is in the public domain in the United States, so you can use it without asking anyone. Where one is shortened, the cut is marked and the note says what is missing.

Updated November 8, 202612 min readWritten by the Reposa team

On this page

Choosing one
Short poems that fit a card
Longer poems to read aloud
Poems with a faith in them
Well-known modern poems
Putting a poem in the program

Choosing one, quickly

People lose whole evenings to this. A shortcut that works: read the first two lines of five poems out loud. One of them will make your throat catch. That is the one. The poem does not have to summarize a life. It only has to give the room somewhere to put its feelings for ninety seconds.

A second shortcut: pick by what the person was like rather than by what a funeral is supposedly meant to sound like. Someone practical and unsentimental would have hated a poem about angels. Someone who gardened for forty years should probably get something with weather in it.

If you want	Look at	Roughly
Comfort, plainly stated	Rossetti, Holland	8–14 lines
Something to read aloud	Tennyson, Whitman	16–30 lines
A long life, well finished	Stevenson, Tennyson	8–12 lines
A death that came too soon	Rossetti, Dickinson	12–20 lines
Faith, without heaviness	Psalms, traditional blessings	6–12 lines
Nothing religious at all	Whitman, Dickinson, Stevenson	any

Short poems that fit a card

These fit on the back of a prayer card or the back panel of a program at a readable size. All are in the public domain.

Requiem

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Stevenson wrote his own epitaph. It is on his grave in Samoa. Good for someone who traveled, or who died contented after a long life.

Remember

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

…

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

Text of the first edition, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). The full sonnet is fourteen lines; lines five to eight are left out where the dots are, to fit a card. The last two lines on their own make a good inscription.

Death Is Nothing At All

Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918)

Death is nothing at all. It does not count.

I have only slipped away into the next room.

Nothing has happened.

Everything remains exactly as it was.

I am I, and you are you,

and the old life that we lived so fondly together

is untouched, unchanged.

Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.

Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.

Put no difference into your tone.

Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed

at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.

Holland’s own words, from a sermon he preached at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1910 and printed in Facts of the Faith (1919), broken into lines at his sentences. The passage goes on from here. The version that usually circulates (“slipped away to the next room”, “Speak to me”) is a later rewording of unknown origin, so it is not the one printed here.

from Song of Myself

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Entirely secular and quietly enormous. Good for someone who worked outdoors, or who had no patience for religion.

Longer poems to read aloud

Crossing the Bar

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

Tennyson asked for this to be placed at the end of every collection of his work. About ninety seconds read aloud. Especially fitting for a sailor, a veteran, or anyone who lived near water.

The Chariot (Because I could not stop for Death)

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,

And I had put away

My labor, and my leisure too,

For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,

Their lessons scarcely done;

We passed the fields of gazing grain,

We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed

A swelling of the ground;

The roof was scarcely visible,

The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’t is centuries; but each

Feels shorter than the day

I first surmised the horses’ heads

Were toward eternity.

Unsentimental and strange, which some families find a relief. This is the whole poem as it was first printed, in Poems (1890), edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, who titled it The Chariot. The version with Dickinson’s own dashes and capitals, and a stanza the 1890 editors left out, comes from a later edition that Harvard still claims copyright in, so it is not printed here.

A Psalm of Life (closing stanzas)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

Bracing rather than mournful. Suits a service that is meant to send people back out into their week.

Poems with a faith in them

If the service already has scripture readings, a poem does not need to carry the religious weight as well. But these sit comfortably in a church service.

from Peace

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,

Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?

When, when, Peacè, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite

To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but

That piecemeal peace is poor peace. …

The opening of an eleven-line poem, stopping halfway through the fifth line, as printed in Hopkins’s Poems (1918); the accent is his stress mark. Difficult and beautiful. Read it aloud before you commit, because it needs a confident reader.

“May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back, may the sun shine warm upon your face.”
Traditional Irish blessing
Public domain. Very often used as a closing line on the back of a program.
“Deep peace of the running wave to you, deep peace of the flowing air to you, deep peace of the quiet earth to you, deep peace of the sleeping stones to you!”
Fiona Macleod (William Sharp), The Dominion of Dreams, 1899
Four lines of a longer blessing, often called a traditional Gaelic one; it is Sharp’s. Works at a graveside and on a card. The “shining stars” and “gentle night” lines sung in churches are from John Rutter’s 1978 anthem and still in copyright.
“Now the labourer’s task is o’er; now the battle day is past; now upon the farther shore lands the voyager at last.”
John Ellerton (1826–1893)
A hymn text, but it reads well as a poem.
“Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.”
Henry Francis Lyte (1793–1847)
See also our list of funeral hymns.

Well-known modern poems

These are the poems most often asked for, and most of them are still in copyright. Read them aloud freely, since nobody needs permission to speak a poem at a funeral. Reprinting the full text in a program you have made two hundred copies of is a different matter, so the usual practice is to print the title and the poet, and let the reading carry it.

Poem	Poet	Suits
Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep	Mary Elizabeth Frye	Almost any service. The most-used funeral poem there is.
Funeral Blues (Stop all the clocks)	W. H. Auden	A partner or a great friend. Raw and unconsoling.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night	Dylan Thomas	Someone who fought hard. Choose carefully, because it is angry.
Death Be Not Proud	John Donne	Public domain and free to print. Defiant, formal, strong.
She Is Gone (He Is Gone)	David Harkins	A celebration of life. Ends on remembering rather than mourning.
The Dash	Linda Ellis	Often read at services for someone whose work mattered to them.
Farewell My Friends	Rabindranath Tagore	Warm and unafraid. Good for a long, full life.

Of those, Death Be Not Proud is safely public domain, since Donne died in 1631, so print it in full if it fits.

Holy Sonnet X (Death Be Not Proud)

John Donne (1572–1631)

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

…

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Lines nine to twelve are left out where the dots are, for length; the ten lines above are the first eight and the closing couplet.

Putting a poem in the program

A poem earns its place on the back panel, opposite the acknowledgement, or on the back of a prayer card. It does not belong on the front cover. The cover carries the name, the dates and the photograph, and nothing else.

Set it centered, in italic, at the same size as the body text or one point smaller, with the poet’s name underneath in small capitals. Keep the original line breaks: a poem reflowed as a paragraph stops being a poem. If it will not fit, cut whole stanzas rather than shrinking the type below about eight and a half points, which is the size at which older guests start to struggle.

In Reposa, a poem is a reading: paste it in, choose whether it appears in the program, on the prayer card, or both, and the layout keeps the line breaks and finds the size that fits the panel. Nothing gets clipped without telling you.

Common questions

How long should a funeral poem be?

For the back of a program or a prayer card, four to twelve lines. Read aloud at the service, a poem of sixteen to thirty lines takes about a minute and a half, which is right. Anything longer starts to feel like a reading rather than a moment.

Can I use any poem I find online?

For a printed program, be careful. Poems first published in 1930 or earlier are in the public domain in the United States and can be reprinted freely there. Many of the poems people find first online are still in copyright, and reprinting them in a program you have made hundreds of copies of is technically an infringement. In practice nobody pursues a grieving family, but the safe approach is to print the title and author and read the poem aloud rather than reproduce it.

Is it acceptable to change a word?

Changing he to she, or son to daughter, is normal and nobody will object. Rewriting a line is a different matter. If the poem no longer fits, choose a different one rather than making it fit.

Who should read the poem?

Somebody who can get through it. That is the only real criterion. Ask a grandchild, a friend from outside the immediate family, or the officiant. Whoever reads it should have a printed copy in their hand even if they know it by heart.

Can I write my own instead?

Yes, and it will mean more than anything on this page. Six honest lines about one specific thing they did beats a famous poem that could be about anyone. Write it, read it aloud once, and stop editing.

What if the poem does not mention God and the family is religious?

That is fine. A poem is not a prayer, and most services carry both. The scripture and the prayers do the religious work; the poem is allowed to just be about the person.