from Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock

There is something joyous in the elegies
Of birds. They seem
Caught up in the formal delight,
Though the mourning dove whistles of despair.

But at last in the thousand of elegies
The dead rise in our hearts,
On the brink of our happiness we stop
Like someone on the drunk starting to weep.

--Galway Kinnell