There is No Death

There is no death!  The stars go down,

To rise upon some fairer shore;

And bright in Heaven’s jeweled crown

They shine for evermore.

There is no death!  The dust we tread

Shall change beneath the Summer showers

To golden grain, or mellow fruit,

Or rainbow-tinted flowers.

The granite rocks disorganize

To feed the hungry moss they bear;

The forest leaves drink daily life

From out the viewless air.

There is no death!  The leaves may fall,

The flowers may pall, and fade away—

They only wait through wintry hours

The coming of the May.

There is no death!  An angel form

Walks o’er the earth with silent tread;

He bears our best loved things away,

And then we call them “dead.”

He leaves our hearts all desolate—

He plucks our fairest, sweetest flowers:

Transplanted into bliss, they now

Adorn immortal bowers.[1]

            - Bulwer[2]

---

[1] The poem quoted here was evidently quite meaningful to Clare.  She underlined the portions underlined above in pencil, and the last selection in pen as well.  This seems to indicate she revisited it and pondered it on multiple occasions.  The poem actually has ten stanzas; only six are included in this excerpt.

[2] This designates the English poet Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton (1831-1891) but is a misattribution.  The poem was written by the American poet John Luckey McCreery (1835-1906).  This mistake was likely not the fault of the periodical from which Clare clipped the poem.  This excerpt from Famous Poems from Bygone Days by Martin Gardner (1995) chronicles the confusion in its biographical sketch of John’s life:

John McCreery was born in Sweden, New York, the son of a Methodist minister.  His career in journalism took him to Delhi, Iowa, in 1857, where he bought a weekly newspaper that he edited until the end of the Civil War. After working for newspapers in Dubuque, he became a clerk with the Committee on Indian Affairs, Washington, D. C., where he later held other government jobs.

There Is No Death, in ten stanzas, with McCreery’s byline, first appeared in Arthur’s Home Journal 22 (July 1863): 41. Then a funny thing happened. A newspaper reprinted the poem, crediting it to one “E. Bulmer,” probably a fictitious name. Other editors assumed that “Bulmer” was a wrong spelling of “Bulwer,” which they took to be Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer, England’s poet who used the pen name Owen Meredith!

McCreery’s poem was soon reprinted everywhere—in anthologies, newspapers, magazines, hymnbooks and school readers—as the work of Meredith. Even Burton Stevenson, who devotes a chapter to this in Famous Single Poems, credited the poem to Meredith in his earlier Home Book of Verse.

No other poem was more recited at funerals and burial sites than There Is No Death.  Poor McCreery spent the rest of his life struggling vainly to prove the poem was indeed his. He included it as the first poem in his Songs of Toil and Triumph (1883), where he revised it heavily, and expanded it to sixteen stanzas.  Stevenson considers the revised version “vastly inferior” to the original, and finds little merit in any of the other poems in the book.

McCreery died in Duluth, Minnesota, after an appendicitis operation, and was buried in Glenwood Cemetery, in the nation’s capital. The first stanza of his once-admired poem is on his modest tombstone.