Sometimes regular words are not enough. A recitation of the departed loved one’s life and accomplishments is important, but rarely captures the poetic vitality of a beautiful life. Composing your own memorial poetry is a wonderful exercise which helps you work through and express your grief and love, but rare is the person who can craft words to say exactly what they want to say.
This is where funeral poems can be extraordinarily helpful. These can vary, from reassured classics, such as Tennyson’s In Memoriam or Stevenson’s Success, or famous religious texts like Psalm 23 or Newton’s Amazing Grace, or even anonymous lines like the epitaph on an Irish tombstone:
