Mary Monck’s “Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath” is among the most moving examples of early eighteenth-century devotional elegiac poetry because it transforms a private farewell into a profound meditation on the claims of love, suffering, faith, and mortality. Written in the voice of a woman anticipating her own death, the poem addresses a husband who is figured at once as beloved companion, “tend’rest husband,” and “best of friends.” Yet its emotional power does not arise merely from the pathos of parting. Monck stages an inward argument between attachment to the human world and trust in a promised eternity. Death is not simply a biological event or an abstract theological certainty; it becomes an active presence, a visitor who summons the speaker away from her husband while paradoxically offering release from the very pain that makes the separation so grievous. The poem’s remarkable achievement lies in its refusal to simplify this conflict. The speaker is serene, devout, and courageous, but she is not emotionally untouched. Her confidence in heaven does not erase love; rather, love gives her farewell its piercing urgency.

The title establishes the poem’s dramatic and geographical specificity. A death-bed poem is already a highly charged genre: it claims the authority of final speech, the imagined or actual utterance of a person who has reached the threshold between temporal life and eternity. The mention of Bath places this private scene within a recognizable social and cultural setting. In Monck’s period, Bath was not only a fashionable resort but a prominent center for health, therapy, sociability, and elite travel. Its mineral waters drew people seeking relief from chronic afflictions, and its reputation as a place of cure adds a poignant undertone to a poem concerned with bodily pain and the impossibility of ultimate earthly recovery. The location does not dominate the verse, but it matters symbolically. A place associated with healing becomes the setting for a speaker whose final healing, as she understands it, will not come from medicine or restorative waters but from death and the heavenly life beyond death.

Mary Monck, born Mary Molesworth into an Anglo-Irish family of significant social standing, belonged to a world in which women’s literary expression was both enabled and constrained by rank, education, domestic expectations, and publication practices. Her work participates in a vibrant culture of women’s poetry that was increasingly visible in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Though women writers often faced dismissive assumptions about their intellectual capacities or the propriety of public authorship, they nevertheless cultivated important literary networks and engaged with major poetic modes: devotional verse, satire, elegy, pastoral, occasional poetry, and translations. Monck’s poem is particularly compelling because its apparent domestic modesty contains a sophisticated exercise of rhetorical authority. The dying wife does not merely receive consolation from religious doctrine or from male clerical voices. She interprets her own experience, addresses her husband directly, defines the meaning of her suffering, and instructs the survivor in the proper ethical response to her death.

That authority is introduced immediately through apostrophe: “Thou, who dost all my worldly thoughts employ.” The repeated “Thou” creates intimacy, but it also grants the husband a strikingly central place in the speaker’s consciousness. He is not named, perhaps because the poem seeks a heightened emotional universality, or because the intimate second person needs no formal identification. The language of “worldly thoughts” and “earthly joy” signals that marital affection belongs to the realm of transience. Yet these phrases should not be mistaken for a cold dismissal of human attachment. On the contrary, the speaker’s choice of superlatives—“tend’rest husband,” “best of friends”—makes the marriage appear unusually tender, companionate, and emotionally reciprocal. In a period when marriage was deeply bound to property, lineage, kinship, and social position, the poem insists on friendship as a defining marital ideal. The husband is not only a social role or protector; he is the person to whom the speaker’s mind and happiness are most fully attached.

The phrase “this first, this last adieu” is exquisitely compressed. It suggests that the poem may be the first formal farewell she has offered and certainly the last she can offer in life. It also gives the poem a ceremonial force. “Adieu,” literally a commendation to God, is at once a secular farewell and a religious gesture. Such doubleness is characteristic of Monck’s writing throughout: the poem never separates emotional language from spiritual language because the drama of death is precisely that it forces the two vocabularies into relation. The wife bids farewell to her husband, but her farewell is spoken under the sign of divine departure. Her speech simultaneously acknowledges the end of earthly communion and imagines a destiny ordered by providence.

Death enters as “the conqu’ror,” a traditional but forceful emblem. In Christian and classical traditions alike, death is often represented as a ruler, a victor, a figure who subdues every human distinction. Monck adopts this inherited image but revises its emotional valence. The conqueror “asserts his right”: death’s sovereignty is inevitable, perhaps even legally framed, as though mortality were a claim that cannot indefinitely be deferred. Yet the poem refuses the grotesque terror often associated with death’s iconography. Death “wooes” the speaker “with a chearful grace,” and “not one terror clouds his meagre face.” The adjective “meagre” retains the traditional physical austerity of death, recalling skeletal or emaciated representations, but “chearful” and “grace” unexpectedly humanize him. The result is not a sentimental denial of death’s severity. Rather, Monck imagines death as a persuasive emissary, one whose frightening outward form has been transformed by the speaker’s religious conviction.

This personification is one of the poem’s most subtle achievements. Death is a conqueror, but also a suitor; he claims, woos, promises, shows, sets before the speaker’s view, and tells. The language of courtship is particularly significant in a poem addressed to a husband. A conventional marital relation is placed in imaginative proximity to death’s strange “wooing,” but the contrast is decisive. The husband is the source of “earthly joy”; death is the agent who directs the speaker toward eternal joy. Death’s courtship does not replace marital love in any simple sense, nor does it eroticize annihilation. Instead, the conceit dramatizes the force with which mortality calls the speaker away from the world. Death appears almost as a minister of divine truth, offering not seduction into nothingness but passage toward “th’ eternal scenes of heav’n.”

The theology expressed here is recognizably Christian, especially in its insistence that bodily suffering is temporary and that heaven provides the only permanent good. “Lasting rest from pain” is a phrase of consolation rooted in a long devotional tradition. Life is presented as unstable and passing; its “fleeting joys” cannot satisfy the soul’s deepest need. Heaven, by contrast, is eternal, true, and durable. Such oppositions between earthly mutability and celestial permanence were common in religious poetry, sermons, funeral meditations, and manuals of preparation for death. The early modern and eighteenth-century Christian imagination frequently encouraged believers to rehearse death not merely as loss but as a final homecoming. Monck’s speaker draws upon that language with notable fluency. However, the poem’s vitality comes from the way doctrine is tested against the actual ache of leaving someone loved.

The central complication arrives with “But love, fond love, would yet resist his pow’r.” The repetition of “love” and the qualifying adjective “fond” deserve close attention. In modern usage, “fond” predominantly conveys affection; in Monck’s idiom, it may also suggest excessive tenderness, foolish attachment, or a love vulnerable to illusion. The phrase therefore both honors and gently corrects the emotion it names. Love is real, strong, and beautiful, but it is also inclined to cling to what must be relinquished. By personifying love as a force that resists death, Monck expands the poem’s psychological drama. The speaker is not simply choosing faith over fear. She is experiencing a conflict in which her own affectionate imagination brings her husband’s “mourning image” before her eyes and attempts to obstruct her “journey to the skies.”

The word “image” is crucial. She does not see the husband physically, or at least the poem emphasizes not his present body but the anticipated picture of his grief. Her pain is therefore partly imaginative and anticipatory. She fears not only her own departure but his bereavement. This is a refined account of love’s moral difficulty at the point of death: attachment becomes painful because it entails responsibility for the suffering of the one left behind. The speaker’s resistance to death is not selfish longing for continued possession of earthly pleasure. It is compassion for the husband she imagines mourning her. Monck thus rejects any easy opposition between piety and love. Love’s resistance is not sinful rebellion; it is the natural recoil of a faithful spouse who cannot bear to inflict sorrow upon her companion.

At the same time, the poem recognizes that the mourner’s image can become an impediment to spiritual release. The verb “obstruct” is unusually concrete. It imagines grief as blocking a road, and the speaker’s transition becomes a “journey to the skies.” This journey metaphor belongs to a rich religious vocabulary in which life is pilgrimage and death is the completion of travel. When the speaker later calls her existence a “painful pilgrimage,” she gives the metaphor personal force. Life has been neither a mere test nor a brief abstraction; it has involved suffering. The poem never specifies the nature of this pain, and its reticence is part of its dignity. Physical illness is clearly implied by the death-bed situation and by death’s promise of rest, but the phrase may encompass the wider burdens of mortal life: bodily weakness, uncertainty, loss, and the trials that attend human attachment.

The shift into direct questioning—“But say, thou dearest, thou unwearied friend; / Say, should’st thou grieve to see my sorrows end?”—is rhetorically brilliant. The speaker appeals to her husband’s love in order to redirect the expression of that love. Her questions are not requests for information. They are persuasive questions, designed to lead him toward an answer that has already been prepared by affection and reason. If he truly knows her suffering, how can he wish it prolonged? If he is truly an “unwearied friend,” how can grief obscure his gratitude that she has found rest? In this way, the poem makes consolation reciprocal. The dying woman comforts the survivor, but she also asks him to participate in her theological understanding of death. Her acceptance depends, emotionally, on his capacity to see her release as mercy.

This appeal may seem, at first glance, to impose an impossible demand on the bereaved: do not grieve, but rejoice. Yet Monck’s language is more nuanced than an absolute prohibition of mourning. She acknowledges his “mourning image” before she asks him to view her death differently. The poem does not deny that grief will arise; indeed, it arises so vividly in the speaker’s imagination that it nearly delays her heavenly journey. What she seeks is not emotional numbness but a reorientation of grief. The husband is asked to hold sorrow and joy together, to lament the loss of her presence while rejoicing in the end of her pain. This emotional doubleness is one reason the poem remains persuasive. It understands bereavement as an experience that cannot be resolved by doctrine alone, even when doctrine offers genuine comfort.

The imperative “Rather rejoice” culminates in an audacious expression: “see me shake off life.” To “shake off” life is startling because life is conventionally the good most tenaciously preserved. The phrase imagines the body and its mortal existence as a burden, garment, or encumbrance that can be cast aside. It is closely related to the poem’s earlier opposition between temporal joys and eternal scenes, but it also carries a personal note of exhaustion. The speaker is not contemptuous of life because she has never known happiness; the opening makes clear that she has known extraordinary marital joy. She can call life something to be shaken off precisely because pain has made its burden oppressive and because faith has given her a more enduring horizon. The expression gains its force from this tension between gratitude for earthly love and readiness to relinquish earthly existence.

The closing claim, “And die as I have liv’d, thy faithful wife,” is both tender and rhetorically final. It refuses to make death an abandonment of marriage. The wife’s bodily removal does not cancel the identity she has inhabited in life; fidelity survives in the language of farewell. The word “faithful” also resonates beyond marital loyalty. It suggests religious faith, constancy of character, and truthfulness. Her faithfulness to her husband and her faith in divine promise are not presented as rival commitments. They become mutually illuminating. By naming herself “thy faithful wife” at the moment of departure, she affirms that consent to death is not a failure of love. On the contrary, it is a final act of honesty: she cannot remain, but she can leave while declaring that her devotion has remained intact.

For a woman poet, this conclusion carries particular cultural weight. Early eighteenth-century ideals of femininity often praised chastity, obedience, modesty, domestic affection, and piety. Monck’s poem works within these ideals, but it does not merely reproduce passive submission. The speaker is active throughout. She sends the farewell, interprets death’s meaning, recognizes love’s resistance, imagines her husband’s sorrow, poses the governing questions, and commands the final response. Her position as wife is neither diminished nor merely decorative; it becomes the ground from which she speaks with moral authority. The poem presents domestic fidelity as intellectually serious and spiritually capacious. Its speaker has the right to define the terms on which she will be remembered, and she does so in language that is at once socially intelligible and emotionally self-possessed.

Monck’s treatment of mortality invites comparison with the devotional poetry of the preceding century, especially writers such as John Donne and George Herbert, whose work often turns death into a subject of argument, encounter, and paradox. Like Donne, Monck can confront death directly without conceding its ultimate triumph; like Herbert, she finds spiritual significance in the tensions between frailty and grace. Yet her poem differs from both in its domestic dramatic situation. Death is not chiefly an occasion for metaphysical wit or theological self-examination. It is an interruption of a marriage defined by friendship. The stakes are not simply whether the soul can conquer fear, but whether one can leave a beloved person without betraying the bond that has made life meaningful. This perspective lends the poem a distinctive emotional realism.

It is also fruitful to place Monck beside other women writers who used devotional language to articulate intimate experience. Women’s religious writing in this era could provide a sanctioned idiom for public seriousness, allowing authors to speak of spiritual matters while also registering personal sorrow, bodily vulnerability, and social limitation. In Monck’s poem, however, theology never feels merely conventional. The religious framework is inseparable from the speaker’s emotional predicament. Heaven matters because her life is ending; the vanity of worldly joys matters because she is about to surrender the person who made those joys most precious. The poem’s doctrine is felt rather than simply announced. Its religious assurance has been forged in the pressure of an imminent farewell.

The poem’s diction balances elevated abstraction with intimate address. “Eternal scenes,” “lasting rest,” “fleeting joys,” and “painful pilgrimage” belong to a broad moral vocabulary, while “thou dearest” and “unwearied friend” preserve the immediacy of personal speech. This oscillation enables Monck to join the universal and the particular. Every reader can recognize the general human fact of mortality, but the poem makes that fact emotionally legible through one marriage and one imagined parting. Even the personified figures of Death and Love are not mere allegorical decorations. They allow the speaker to externalize competing impulses: faith’s readiness for release and affection’s desire to remain. Poetry here becomes a form of emotional thinking. It gives shape to feelings that might otherwise be inchoate, contradictory, or unbearable.

There is a notable serenity in the poem’s movement, but it is a serenity achieved through confrontation rather than evasion. Monck does not pretend that death is beautiful in itself, nor does she sentimentalize physical suffering. Death has a “meagre face”; life has been painful; the husband will mourn. These facts remain. What changes is the speaker’s interpretation of them. By viewing death as a passage toward rest, she makes suffering finite. By calling life a pilgrimage, she gives its trials direction. By asking her husband to rejoice in the end of her sorrows, she seeks to convert bereavement from a spectacle of defeat into an act of compassionate recognition. Such transformations are the work of faith, but they are also the work of art.

The poem’s emotional impact depends finally on its exquisite balance of restraint and intensity. It does not indulge in elaborate scenes of physical decline or in dramatic displays of terror. Instead, its feeling is concentrated in a few decisive gestures: the husband who occupies every worldly thought, the cheerful yet meagre face of death, the imagined sorrow that obstructs the soul’s ascent, and the final assertion of wifely fidelity. This economy gives the poem a remarkable clarity. Readers are invited to inhabit the speaker’s dilemma without being overwhelmed by ornament or abstraction. Her voice is composed, but composition is not emotional absence. It is the form her love takes when love must speak under the shadow of departure.

“Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath” endures because it honors both sides of the human response to death. It affirms the religious hope that suffering may end and that death may open onto a reality beyond temporal loss. At the same time, it insists that a life touched by genuine affection cannot be surrendered without pain. Monck’s speaker does not become less loving as she becomes more prepared to die; her readiness for death is made poignant by the depth of the love she leaves behind. This union of spiritual confidence and domestic tenderness gives the poem its lasting radiance. It remains a compelling demonstration of poetry’s capacity to make mortality speak—not as a mute extinction, but as an occasion for courage, argument, consolation, and a final, unforgettable declaration of faithful love.

Alexander Pope’s The Dying Christian to his Soul stands as a luminous distillation of Enlightenment-era spiritual yearning, rendered with the precision and emotional intensity that characterize his finest verse. Though compact in form, the poem unfolds as a profound meditation on mortality, transcendence, and the soul’s ecstatic release from earthly constraints. Written during a period when religious orthodoxy was increasingly interrogated by rationalist thought, Pope’s lyric navigates this tension not through dogma but through visceral immediacy—a first-person account of the threshold between life and eternity. The poem’s power lies less in doctrinal assertion than in its evocation of an experience so intimate and overwhelming that it transcends theological debate, appealing instead to the universal human longing for meaning beyond the grave.

Composed in the early eighteenth century—likely around 1712, though not published until 1718—the poem emerges from a cultural moment defined by both intellectual ferment and spiritual uncertainty. The post-Reformation landscape of England had fractured religious consensus, while the rise of empirical philosophy, championed by figures such as John Locke, encouraged skepticism toward metaphysical claims unverifiable by sensory experience. Yet even as reason ascended, the human psyche remained haunted by questions of death, salvation, and the afterlife. Pope, a Roman Catholic in a predominantly Protestant nation, occupied a liminal social and spiritual position; barred from university and public office due to his faith, he was acutely aware of exclusion and impermanence. This biographical context infuses his work with a sensitivity to boundaries—between worlds, states of being, and modes of perception—that finds exquisite expression in The Dying Christian to his Soul. The poem does not argue for immortality; it enacts it.

From its opening invocation—“Vital spark of heavenly flame!”—the poem establishes a dualistic framework inherited from Neoplatonism and Christian mysticism: the soul as divine essence temporarily imprisoned in corruptible flesh. The address to the soul as “spark” suggests both fragility and latent brilliance, a flicker of the eternal momentarily dimmed by mortal embodiment. The imperative “Quit, oh quit this mortal frame” carries urgency, yet it is tempered by paradox: the speaker is simultaneously “Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying.” These four participles encapsulate the ambivalence of dying—not as a single event but as a liminal process suspended between fear and rapture, reluctance and release. The oxymoronic pairing “the pain, the bliss of dying” crystallizes this tension, acknowledging physical suffering while asserting a counterbalancing spiritual joy so intense it redefines agony itself. Here, Pope draws upon a long tradition of Christian paradox, echoing St. Paul’s assertion that to live is Christ and to die is gain, yet he renders it not as abstract theology but as embodied sensation.

The second stanza deepens this interior drama by introducing auditory hallucination or revelation: “Hark! they whisper; angels say, / ‘Sister Spirit, come away!’” The shift from internal monologue to celestial summons marks a crucial transition—the soul is no longer merely contemplating departure but is being called home. The phrase “Sister Spirit” is particularly resonant; it implies kinship among the elect, a community of purified souls awaiting reunion. This language reflects the influence of devotional literature popular in Pope’s time, especially works emphasizing the soul’s familial relationship with the divine. Yet Pope avoids sentimentality. The speaker’s response is not passive acceptance but bewildered inquiry: “What is this absorbs me quite? / Steals my senses, shuts my sight, / Drowns my spirits, draws my breath?” Each verb conveys a progressive dissolution of bodily faculties, yet the tone is one of awe rather than terror. The rhetorical question “Tell me, my soul, can this be Death?” reveals a mind struggling to name the ineffable. Death, traditionally personified as a grim reaper or skeletal specter, is here experienced as an overwhelming presence that defies conventional imagery—a force that “absorbs,” “steals,” “shuts,” “drowns,” and “draws” with irresistible gentleness.

This transformation of death from adversary to liberator culminates in the final stanza, where spatial and perceptual boundaries collapse entirely. “The world recedes; it disappears!” announces a radical detachment from earthly concerns. The exclamation marks throughout this stanza convey mounting ecstasy, as if the speaker can scarcely contain the wonder of what unfolds. Vision and hearing—those senses most tied to material reality—are transfigured: “Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears / With sounds seraphic ring!” The syntax mirrors the experience: clauses tumble forth without pause, mimicking the rush of revelation. Notably, Pope does not describe heaven’s appearance in concrete terms (no golden streets or pearly gates); instead, he emphasizes the opening—a dynamic, active unveiling that suggests participation rather than passive observation. The request “Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!” echoes Milton’s Satan (“Hail, horrors! hail, infernal world!”) in its energetic ascent, yet Pope repurposes this vertical motion for redemptive ends. Where Milton’s fallen angel rises in defiance, Pope’s soul ascends in surrender, propelled not by pride but by grace.

The poem’s climax arrives with the triumphant allusion to St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: “O Grave! where is thy victory? / O Death! where is thy sting?” By invoking this scriptural passage, Pope situates his personal vision within a grand theological narrative of resurrection and redemption. Yet the power of these lines derives not from their familiarity alone but from their placement at the culmination of an intensely subjective journey. Having traversed trembling hesitation and sensory dissolution, the speaker now speaks with the authority of one who has crossed the threshold. The rhetorical questions are not queries but declarations—their answers self-evident in the light of heavenly vision. In this moment, the poem transcends individual experience to touch the universal Christian hope in eternal life, yet it does so without abstraction. The emotion remains palpable, immediate, as if the reader too stands on the brink of revelation.

Literary devices throughout the poem serve not as ornament but as essential conduits for its spiritual drama. Apostrophe—the direct address to the soul, to Nature, to Death, to the Grave—creates intimacy while also dramatizing the soul’s dialogue with cosmic forces. Personification imbues abstract concepts with agency: Nature “ceases her strife,” Death possesses a “sting,” the Grave claims “victory.” Yet Pope avoids static allegory; these entities are not fixed symbols but dynamic participants in the soul’s passage. Sensory imagery dominates, particularly synesthesia—the blending of senses—as when “sounds seraphic” accompany visual revelation, suggesting a mode of perception beyond ordinary human limits. Verbs of motion and transformation (“languish into life,” “mount,” “fly,” “recedes”) reinforce the poem’s central theme of transition, while exclamatory syntax conveys emotional crescendo without lapsing into hysteria.

Thematically, the poem explores the paradox of death as both end and beginning, loss and gain, silence and song. It engages with the Augustinian notion of felix culpa—the “happy fault” of Adam’s sin that made Christ’s redemption possible—by framing mortal dissolution as the necessary prelude to eternal flourishing. Yet Pope’s emphasis is less on original sin than on present liberation. The body is not vilified but gently set aside, like a garment no longer needed. This reflects a broader shift in eighteenth-century piety toward a more affective, experiential spirituality—one less concerned with doctrinal correctness than with the heart’s encounter with the divine. In this sense, the poem anticipates the evangelical revivals later in the century, though it remains rooted in the classical restraint characteristic of Pope’s aesthetic.

Emotionally, the poem moves from agitation to awe, from uncertainty to certainty, without ever sacrificing psychological realism. The initial “trembling” is never fully erased; even in ecstasy, there remains a trace of human vulnerability. This balance prevents the poem from becoming mere triumphalism. Instead, it offers a vision of hope that acknowledges the gravity of mortality while affirming a greater reality beyond it. The emotional impact on the reader arises from this authenticity—the sense that we are witnessing not a constructed ideal but a genuine moment of transcendence, rendered with poetic mastery.

Comparatively, The Dying Christian to his Soul may be read alongside other meditations on death in English literature. Unlike Donne’s Holy Sonnets, which wrestle with divine judgment and the soul’s unworthiness, Pope’s poem assumes grace as given, focusing on the joy of reception rather than the anxiety of worthiness. Where Herbert’s “The Collar” dramatizes rebellion before submission, Pope’s speaker begins in yearning and ends in fulfillment without intermediary struggle. Even Milton’s Paradise Lost, for all its grandeur, portrays death as a consequence of sin; Pope, by contrast, presents it as a portal. This difference reflects not only theological nuance but also historical temperament: the early eighteenth century, for all its rationalism, retained a deep current of mystical aspiration, and Pope channels this with remarkable economy.

Philosophically, the poem engages with questions central to both ancient and modern thought: What is the nature of consciousness at the point of death? Can the self persist beyond bodily decay? While Pope does not offer philosophical argument, his poem functions as phenomenological testimony—a record of how dying might feel to one assured of salvation. In doing so, it challenges purely materialist accounts of existence, suggesting that human experience at its extremity points beyond itself. The dissolution of the senses does not lead to nothingness but to heightened perception; the loss of breath becomes the prelude to flight. This vision aligns with Platonic ideals of the soul’s return to its origin, yet it is filtered through a distinctly Christian lens of resurrection and communal joy.

Pope’s achievement lies in making this transcendent vision feel immediate and personal. He avoids ecclesiastical jargon, eschews elaborate metaphor for direct address, and grounds metaphysical claims in sensory detail. The poem’s brevity enhances its power; every word serves the unfolding drama, with no room for digression or abstraction. This concision is not minimalism but distillation—the essence of a spiritual experience rendered in its purest form. For modern readers, perhaps skeptical of heavenly visions yet attuned to the mystery of consciousness, the poem retains its resonance. It does not demand belief but invites imagination—to consider, if only for a moment, what it might mean to hear angels whisper, to see heaven open, to ask Death where its sting has gone.

In conclusion, The Dying Christian to his Soul exemplifies poetry’s unique capacity to give voice to the ineffable. Through its masterful interweaving of historical context, literary craft, and emotional truth, it transforms a private moment of dying into a shared vision of hope. Pope, often remembered for his satires and epigrams, reveals here a profound lyrical sensibility attuned to the deepest currents of human longing. The poem endures not because it answers all questions about death, but because it dares to imagine an answer with such beauty, urgency, and grace that it continues to stir the soul centuries later. In an age that often reduces death to clinical event or existential void, Pope’s ecstatic farewell reminds us of poetry’s enduring power to illuminate the darkness with “heavenly flame.”