What do you think?
Rate this book
Love Remembered: A Book of Comfort in Grief
This beautiful anthology will help all those who are going through the valley of the shadow of death. The words express the disbelief, the grief, the anger and the sadness that they feel, as they move slowly through the stages of loss.
The words of writers and poets like Tennyson, Thoreau and Auden are reassuring companions for those who have lost a loved one. Illustrated with Victorian paintings and cards, this book - which was inspired by the death of the author's mother - is a perfect gift for those who mourn.
The words of writers and poets like Tennyson, Thoreau and Auden are reassuring companions for those who have lost a loved one. Illustrated with Victorian paintings and cards, this book - which was inspired by the death of the author's mother - is a perfect gift for those who mourn.
96 pages, Hardcover
First published July 21, 1997
7 people want to read
About the author
Celia Haddon
73 books13 followers"I have loved animals from as far back as I can remember", writes Celia Haddon. "As a child, I realised that some animals suffered at the hands of ignorant humans. To right this I have published several books about cats. Cats make me laugh. We humans don't really understand them, though. If we did, they would have a happier life.
For 20 years I wrote about companion animals (pets) for the Daily Telegraph. For 12 of these years I was a pet agony aunt and dealt with about 100,000 letters. My aim was to improve animals' lives by giving good information - and, with luck, to make my readers laugh at the same time.
I have also written several daily quotation books, now out of print, and a history of the first English Olimpick Games in 1612 - now republished in Kindle. My latest cat is Tilly and my latest cat book is Tilly: the Ugliest Cat in the Shelter. It tells the story of how I rescued Tilly from 18 months without adoption; and how she rescued me in the darkest moment of my life.
Tilly tweets at http://twitter.com/TillyUgliestCat
My former cat George lives on digitally and advises other cats how to train humans at http://george-online.blogspot.com
My website with useful animal behaviour information is www.catexpert.co.uk
- from Amazon
For 20 years I wrote about companion animals (pets) for the Daily Telegraph. For 12 of these years I was a pet agony aunt and dealt with about 100,000 letters. My aim was to improve animals' lives by giving good information - and, with luck, to make my readers laugh at the same time.
I have also written several daily quotation books, now out of print, and a history of the first English Olimpick Games in 1612 - now republished in Kindle. My latest cat is Tilly and my latest cat book is Tilly: the Ugliest Cat in the Shelter. It tells the story of how I rescued Tilly from 18 months without adoption; and how she rescued me in the darkest moment of my life.
Tilly tweets at http://twitter.com/TillyUgliestCat
My former cat George lives on digitally and advises other cats how to train humans at http://george-online.blogspot.com
My website with useful animal behaviour information is www.catexpert.co.uk
- from Amazon
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 15, 2018
Love Remembered: A Book of Comfort in Grief is a small anthology of poetry accompanied by colour plates. Most of the plates are full page, and selected to be appropriate to the poem opposite. All are taken from Victorian paintings. The poems include famous ones by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth, W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, Kahil Gibran, Walt Whitman and many others. There are also short prose pieces, including ones by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, C.S. Lewis and Henry James.
The selection has been made by Celia Haddon, who has edited many other anthologies of poetry. This one was inspired by the death of her own mother. Some of the poems may be familiar to the reader, and others new. They reflect all the stages one may go through, after the death of a loved one: disbelief, grief, anger and sadness.
The book is small, but attractively produced, on glossy paper. Each painting is set within a border, which alternates between grey marble and cream. Small details of watercolours are interspersed with the longer poems. The choice of Victorian paintings was an apposite one, since these have a Romantic feel, often representing Nature; either a pastoral scene or a landscape. Other are interiors with perhaps one solitary, grieving individual. A few are spiritual, mostly from the Christian tradition.
I will include here some which I particularly like, but since this is a personal choice, others in the anthology may have a very different feel and message. It is designed to appeal to all, and provide reassurance.
W. Scott Myles - The Butterflies' Haunt
“Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.”
- Mary Elizabeth Frye
Joseph Thors - Autumn in the Woods
“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.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
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.”
- Christina Rossetti
John Atkinson Grimshaw - The Lovers
The Ship
“I am standing on the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength and I stand and watch her till at length she fades on the horizon, and someone at my side says: ‘She is gone.’
Gone where? Gone from my sight that is all. She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when she I saw her, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.
The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her; and just at the moment when someone at my side says: ‘She is gone,’ there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout ‘There she comes!’ And that is Dying.”
- Charles Henry Brent
Veillon, Auguste Louis - Calm Water
“‘There is nothing,’ cried her friend, ‘no, nothing innocent or good, that dies, and is forgotten. Let us hold to that faith, or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in its cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those who loved it, and will play its part, through them, in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deepest sea. There is not an angel added to the Host of Heaven but does its blessed work on earth in those that loved it here. Forgotten! oh, if the good deeds of human creatures could be traced to their source, how beautiful would even death appear; for how much charity, mercy, and purified affection, would be seen to have their growth in dusty graves!’”
- Charles Dickens - The Old Curiosity Shop
Arthur Hughes - Resignation
“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
- W.H. Auden
***
A Reminder
“If I should die and leave you here awhile,
Be not like others, sore undone, who keep
Long vigils by the silent dust, and weep.
For my sake, turn again to life and smile,
Nerving thy heart and trembling hand to do
Something to comfort weaker hearts than thine.
Complete those dear unfinished tasks of mine,
And I perchance may therein comfort you!”
- A. Price Hughes
William Blacklock - Lunchtime Preparations
“Nothing will remove the awful ache, I know. Remember - won’t you? - that it is a sign of the success of your relationship with each other …
Inevitably there will be things which you will wish had been different … This constant underground worry of “if only I had done …” whatever it may be, is an inevitable part of dying for those of us who are left behind … We all muddle on, and only do what we can, and not even always that. But if it is done because of love, then that is enough.”
- Margaret J. Challis
Carl Aagard - A Forest Glade
Some thoughts on Loss
“… the departed may be nearer to us than when they were present … Friends are as often brought near together as separated by death …
I perceive that we partially die ourselves, through sympathy, at the death of each of our friends or near relatives …
The death of friends should inspire us as much as their lives.”
- Henry David Thoreau
***
“There would be no difference between the living and the dead if we but knew how to remember … We do not mourn those who live in lands which we shall not visit, because we know that it depends on us whether we go to find them. Let it be the same with our dead. Instead of believing that they have disappeared, never to return, tell yourself that they are in a country to which you assuredly will go soon, a country not so far away …
Try then to recall those whom you have lost, before it is too late, before they have gone too far; and you will see that they will come much closer to your heart, that they will belong to you more truly, that they are as real as when they were in the flesh.”
- Maurice Maeterlinck
***
Continuities
“Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.”
- Walt Whitman
Ivan Aizakovsky - Farewell to the Black Sea
“We need to get over the question that focus on the past and on the pain - “why did this happen to me?” - and ask instead the question that opens doors to the future - “Now that this has happened what shall I do about it?” … The facts of life and death are neutral … If the death and suffering of someone we love makes us bitter, jealous, against all religion, and incapable of happiness, we turn the person who dies onto one of the “devil’s martyrs”. If [it] brings us to explore the limits of our capacity for strength and love and cheerfulness … then we make the person into a witness for the affirmation of life rather than its rejection.”
- Harold Kushner
***
Trees
“O dreamy, gloomy, friendly Trees,
I came along your narrow track
To bring my gifts unto your knees
And gifts did you give back;
For when I brought this heart that burns -
These thoughts that bitterly repine -
And laid them here among the ferns
And the hum of boughs divine,
Ye, vastest breathers of the air,
Shook down with slow and mighty poise
Your coolness on the human care,
Your wonder on its toys,
Your greenness on the heart’s despair,
Your darkness on its noise.”
- Frederic Herbert Trench
Edmund Warren - Landscape with Foxgloves
Love Lives Beyond the Tomb
“Love lives beyond
The tomb, the earth, which fades like dew—
I love the fond,
The faithful, and the true
Love lives in sleep,
The happiness of healthy dreams:
Eve’s dews may weep,
But love delightful seems.
’Tis seen in flowers,
And in the morning’s pearly dew;
In earth’s green hours,
And in the heaven’s eternal blue.
’Tis heard in Spring
When light and sunbeams, warm and kind,
On angel’s wing
Bring love and music to the mind …
Love lives beyond
The tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew.
I love the fond,
The faithful, young and true.”
- John Clare
- J.W. Waterhouse - The Annunciation
The selection has been made by Celia Haddon, who has edited many other anthologies of poetry. This one was inspired by the death of her own mother. Some of the poems may be familiar to the reader, and others new. They reflect all the stages one may go through, after the death of a loved one: disbelief, grief, anger and sadness.
The book is small, but attractively produced, on glossy paper. Each painting is set within a border, which alternates between grey marble and cream. Small details of watercolours are interspersed with the longer poems. The choice of Victorian paintings was an apposite one, since these have a Romantic feel, often representing Nature; either a pastoral scene or a landscape. Other are interiors with perhaps one solitary, grieving individual. A few are spiritual, mostly from the Christian tradition.
I will include here some which I particularly like, but since this is a personal choice, others in the anthology may have a very different feel and message. It is designed to appeal to all, and provide reassurance.
W. Scott Myles - The Butterflies' Haunt
“Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.”
- Mary Elizabeth Frye
Joseph Thors - Autumn in the Woods
“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.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
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.”
- Christina Rossetti
John Atkinson Grimshaw - The Lovers
The Ship
“I am standing on the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength and I stand and watch her till at length she fades on the horizon, and someone at my side says: ‘She is gone.’
Gone where? Gone from my sight that is all. She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when she I saw her, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.
The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her; and just at the moment when someone at my side says: ‘She is gone,’ there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout ‘There she comes!’ And that is Dying.”
- Charles Henry Brent
Veillon, Auguste Louis - Calm Water
“‘There is nothing,’ cried her friend, ‘no, nothing innocent or good, that dies, and is forgotten. Let us hold to that faith, or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in its cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those who loved it, and will play its part, through them, in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deepest sea. There is not an angel added to the Host of Heaven but does its blessed work on earth in those that loved it here. Forgotten! oh, if the good deeds of human creatures could be traced to their source, how beautiful would even death appear; for how much charity, mercy, and purified affection, would be seen to have their growth in dusty graves!’”
- Charles Dickens - The Old Curiosity Shop
Arthur Hughes - Resignation
“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
- W.H. Auden
***
A Reminder
“If I should die and leave you here awhile,
Be not like others, sore undone, who keep
Long vigils by the silent dust, and weep.
For my sake, turn again to life and smile,
Nerving thy heart and trembling hand to do
Something to comfort weaker hearts than thine.
Complete those dear unfinished tasks of mine,
And I perchance may therein comfort you!”
- A. Price Hughes
William Blacklock - Lunchtime Preparations
“Nothing will remove the awful ache, I know. Remember - won’t you? - that it is a sign of the success of your relationship with each other …
Inevitably there will be things which you will wish had been different … This constant underground worry of “if only I had done …” whatever it may be, is an inevitable part of dying for those of us who are left behind … We all muddle on, and only do what we can, and not even always that. But if it is done because of love, then that is enough.”
- Margaret J. Challis
Carl Aagard - A Forest Glade
Some thoughts on Loss
“… the departed may be nearer to us than when they were present … Friends are as often brought near together as separated by death …
I perceive that we partially die ourselves, through sympathy, at the death of each of our friends or near relatives …
The death of friends should inspire us as much as their lives.”
- Henry David Thoreau
***
“There would be no difference between the living and the dead if we but knew how to remember … We do not mourn those who live in lands which we shall not visit, because we know that it depends on us whether we go to find them. Let it be the same with our dead. Instead of believing that they have disappeared, never to return, tell yourself that they are in a country to which you assuredly will go soon, a country not so far away …
Try then to recall those whom you have lost, before it is too late, before they have gone too far; and you will see that they will come much closer to your heart, that they will belong to you more truly, that they are as real as when they were in the flesh.”
- Maurice Maeterlinck
***
Continuities
“Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.”
- Walt Whitman
Ivan Aizakovsky - Farewell to the Black Sea
“We need to get over the question that focus on the past and on the pain - “why did this happen to me?” - and ask instead the question that opens doors to the future - “Now that this has happened what shall I do about it?” … The facts of life and death are neutral … If the death and suffering of someone we love makes us bitter, jealous, against all religion, and incapable of happiness, we turn the person who dies onto one of the “devil’s martyrs”. If [it] brings us to explore the limits of our capacity for strength and love and cheerfulness … then we make the person into a witness for the affirmation of life rather than its rejection.”
- Harold Kushner
***
Trees
“O dreamy, gloomy, friendly Trees,
I came along your narrow track
To bring my gifts unto your knees
And gifts did you give back;
For when I brought this heart that burns -
These thoughts that bitterly repine -
And laid them here among the ferns
And the hum of boughs divine,
Ye, vastest breathers of the air,
Shook down with slow and mighty poise
Your coolness on the human care,
Your wonder on its toys,
Your greenness on the heart’s despair,
Your darkness on its noise.”
- Frederic Herbert Trench
Edmund Warren - Landscape with Foxgloves
Love Lives Beyond the Tomb
“Love lives beyond
The tomb, the earth, which fades like dew—
I love the fond,
The faithful, and the true
Love lives in sleep,
The happiness of healthy dreams:
Eve’s dews may weep,
But love delightful seems.
’Tis seen in flowers,
And in the morning’s pearly dew;
In earth’s green hours,
And in the heaven’s eternal blue.
’Tis heard in Spring
When light and sunbeams, warm and kind,
On angel’s wing
Bring love and music to the mind …
Love lives beyond
The tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew.
I love the fond,
The faithful, young and true.”
- John Clare
- J.W. Waterhouse - The Annunciation
Displaying 1 of 1 review