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About this quote

What does it mean?
The speaker asks who is mourning the dead, describing a dark mantle and heavy heart over a deathbed.
In plain terms
Who is mourning the dead with heavy hearts and silence?
What can you take from it?
Mourning is silent and heavy.

Where it applies

  • funerals
  • grieving
  • remembrance

Putting it to work

  • writing elegies
  • comforting the bereaved
  • memorializing

Questions to consider

  • How does grief manifest silently?
  • What is the role of monuments?

Another view

It focuses on spectacle of grief rather than process.

More from Percy Bysshe Shelley

  1. A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift - A Love in desolation masked; - a Power Girt round with weakness; - it can scarce uplift The weight of the superincumben…

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  2. Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - He hath awakened from the dream of life.

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  3. The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame Over his living head like Heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument, Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In s…

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