A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
Medical tag
Grief
Bereavement, mourning, pathological grief.
Works
Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein, 'Everyone dies for himself alone') opens in Berlin in 1940, as the postwoman Eva Kluge delivers to Otto and Anna Quangel the news that their only son has been killed in the invasion of France. The Quangels live in a tenement at 55 Jablonski Strasse with neighbours who represent the range of life under Nazism: the Persickes, a family of brutal Party loyalists; old Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish widow whose flat is looted and who is hounded until she jumps to her death; and retired judge Fromm, who quietly helps where he can.
Locke says in the Epistle to the Reader that the Essay began when five or six friends meeting in his rooms found themselves at a standstill over questions of morality and revealed religion, and he proposed that they first examine what objects human understanding is fitted to deal with. Nearly twenty years later the result was a long, patient survey of where ideas come from, how they combine, how words signify them and how far knowledge and probable belief can reach.
Beowulf remembers a northern heroic world through three combats that join glory to mortality. Hrothgar's hall Heorot, built as a center of gift-giving and song, becomes a place of terror when Grendel attacks the sleeping retainers.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses is an anthology concept rather than one single-author book: it gathers public religious speech from Black Christian leaders before 1950, using only public-domain sermons, convention addresses, ordination sermons, and printed appeals. Its center is the Black church as pulpit, school, refuge, protest platform, mutual-aid network, and political institution.
The Essays volume is a selection from the Moralia, the miscellaneous body of some seventy-eight surviving treatises attributed to Plutarch, alongside his famous Lives. Where the Lives teach ethics through the example of great men, the Moralia address readers directly, offering practical moral philosophy in the form of lectures, letters, dialogues and consolations.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Fathers and Sons is set in the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1859, two years before the emancipation of the serfs. Arkady Kirsanov, a newly graduated student, returns to his father's modest, poorly run estate, Maryino, bringing his friend and mentor Yevgeny Bazarov, a brusque, brilliant medical student of humble origins who calls himself a nihilist: he accepts no principle on authority and values only what is useful, especially natural science.
Fear and Trembling: Dialectical Lyric appeared in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, 'John of silence', the same day as Repetition. Its subject is Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to take his son Isaac to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), translated by Abbott as Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, is a short book with a narrow and ambitious aim: to identify and establish the supreme principle of morality. It does not offer a full ethical system, which Kant postponed to the Metaphysics of Morals of 1797, but clears the ground by asking what must be true of moral obligation if it is to bind every rational being without exception.
Augustine's Homilies on the Gospel of John are pastoral expositions of one of Christianity's most theologically dense texts. Preached to a congregation rather than composed as a detached treatise, they move through John's prologue, signs, discourses, passion narrative, resurrection appearances, and final scenes with Peter and the beloved disciple.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
King Lear begins with a political and familial error: Lear divides Britain according to a public love test, accepts the fluent flattery of Goneril and Regan, rejects Cordelia's plain truth, and banishes Kent for trying to correct him. The abdication leaves Lear with the name of king but without the substance of rule, and the tragedy strips away retinue, shelter, authority, sanity, and finally family.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
Medea and Other Plays centers on Euripides’ art of making the socially powerless terrifyingly articulate. Medea begins after Jason has abandoned his foreign wife and children to marry the Corinthian princess.
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
On Fairy-Stories is Tolkien's defense of fairy-story as a serious form of imaginative art. He begins by rejecting narrow definitions that identify fairy tales with children, small supernatural beings, dreams, or mere folklore collection.
This small volume presents Montaigne's celebrated essay on friendship together with other essays from the Essais in M. A.
Our Town presents Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, through three acts named Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death and Eternity. The Stage Manager introduces streets, families, dates, statistics, church steeples, milk deliveries, schoolbooks, and weather with almost no scenery, making the ordinary visible by stripping theater to gesture, voice, and memory.
Persuasion is Austen's last completed novel, a story of second chances. Anne Elliot is the overlooked middle daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, a vain and extravagant baronet of Kellynch Hall in Somerset.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems, published after his death in 1918, bring together a Jesuit priest's experiments in sound, perception, praise, and spiritual desolation. Hopkins's key ideas of inscape and instress name the particular form of a created thing and the energy by which that form is apprehended.
Calvin's Selected Sermons present the Reformation as disciplined exposition rather than only protest. Preaching in Geneva, Calvin moved sequentially through biblical books, applying Scripture to doctrine, worship, civic life, household conduct, suffering, and church reform.
Spurgeon's Selected Sermons show Victorian evangelical preaching at industrial scale. Week by week, his sermons moved from pulpit to print, reaching readers far beyond the Metropolitan Tabernacle.
Moody's Selected Sermons represent revival preaching after the Civil War, in the age of railroads, urbanization, mass meetings, gospel hymnody, and organized evangelistic campaigns. Moody's style is famously plain.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces.
Testament of Youth is Vera Brittain's memoir of the years 1900 to 1925, centred on the First World War, written to show what the war meant to a generation of women. It begins with her provincial girlhood in Buxton, where she chafes against the expectations placed on a middle-class daughter, educates herself, and fights to be allowed to sit the entrance examination for Oxford.
The Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
The Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
This volume contains Tacitus' two earliest works, both written in 98 CE, soon after the assassination of the emperor Domitian. The Agricola is a biography and eulogy of the author's father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who died in 93.
The Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.
The Brothers Karamazov centers on the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a sensual, neglectful father whose sons embody conflicting responses to desire, faith, reason, and guilt. Dmitri is passionate, impulsive, indebted, and publicly at war with his father over inheritance and Grushenka.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
The Consolation of Philosophy is a prison dialogue between the condemned Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside when he is sick with grief and self-pity. The work alternates prose and metre.
Darwin's Expression of the Emotions is one of the founding works of comparative psychology. It asks how humans and animals express fear, anger, joy, grief, shame, disgust, attention, and other states through face, posture, voice, tears, hair, muscles, and involuntary action.
The Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its subject, announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles. A plague sent by Apollo ravages the Greek camp because Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans, has refused to return the captive daughter of Apollo's priest Chryses.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoyevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoyevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
The Nibelungenlied is a medieval German epic of courtship, deception, insult and catastrophic revenge. Its first half centers on Siegfried, prince of Xanten, who comes to Worms hoping to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Gernot and Giselher.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Oresteia follows the House of Atreus from inherited blood guilt to the foundation of civic justice. Agamemnon opens at Argos, where a watchman sees the beacon announcing Troy’s fall.
The Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The Secret Garden begins in imperial India, where Mary Lennox is a sickly, spoiled and emotionally neglected child. A cholera outbreak kills her parents and household, and Mary is sent to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire to live with her reclusive uncle Archibald Craven.
The Theban Plays collects Sophocles’ tragedies about Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They were not written as a trilogy, but together they form the most influential family disaster in Western drama.
The Waves follows six speaking consciousnesses from childhood to old age: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis. A seventh figure, Percival, never speaks directly but becomes the focus of admiration, desire and grief.
John Adams's Thoughts on Government and selected letters present a founder preoccupied with constitutional balance, civic virtue, law, ambition, and the fragility of republics. Thoughts on Government, written in 1776, argues that new American states should avoid simple unicameral democracy and instead build mixed, balanced institutions with separated powers and independent courts.
Travels with My Aunt begins with retired bank manager Henry Pulling attending his mother's funeral. There he meets his formidable Aunt Augusta, who disrupts his suburban routine and suggests that his family history is less settled than he believed.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
Washington Square is a compact novel about an heiress, a suitor and a father whose intelligence becomes a weapon. Catherine Sloper is the plain, shy and dutiful daughter of Dr.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr.
Passages
- A Christmas Carol, Stave IV
An unattended corpse stripped of its bed-curtains and shirt; the Cratchits mourn Tiny Tim.
- Alone in Berlin, Part I, opening
Anna's collapse on hearing of her son's death and Otto's silent, hardening grief.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Ch. XXXIII, §7–16
Associations producing antipathies (surfeit of honey), fear of the dark, rumination on injury, aversion to places of illness, unending grief, aversion to a surgeon who cured madness, and context-bound dancing.
- Beowulf, The dragon and the barrow
Beowulf gives this tag concrete force through the medical interest lies in battle wounds, grief, aging kingship, and the social care owed to bodies that have been broken in public violence
- Ceremony, Flashbacks to the Philippines
The Bataan march, Rocky's wounds and death, and the execution of Japanese prisoners.
- City of God, Book 19
Earthly peace is real but fragile, framed against the final peace of God’s city.
- Confessions, Book IV.4–9
Grief at the death of a friend: weeping, hatred of familiar places, weariness of life and fear of death.
- Confessions, Book IX.10–13
Monica's fever and death at Ostia and Augustine's struggle to restrain his tears.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 9
David learns of his mother's death and that of her newborn baby.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 48–53
Dora's illness and death, and David's grief.
- Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses, Abolition and emancipation sermons
Preachers interpret slavery and racial violence as wounds requiring public repentance, endurance, and liberation.
- Essays, Consolation to his Wife
Plutarch's letter on the death of their two-year-old daughter, urging moderated mourning and describing his wife's composure.
- Essays, Book I, Ch. XXVII, 'Of Friendship'
Memorial to La Boétie, whose death leaves Montaigne describing himself as only half a person.
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 28
Bazarov's old parents visit his grave.
- Fear and Trembling, Preamble from the Heart
The lad who renounces the princess and transforms lost love into eternal remembrance, a model of resignation set beside grief.
- Frankenstein, Vol. II, Ch. I (1818) / Ch. 9 (1831)
After Justine's execution, Victor's despondency, sleeplessness and thoughts of drowning himself in the lake.
- Frankenstein, Vol. III, Ch. VII (1818) / Ch. 23–24 (1831)
Alphonse Frankenstein dies of grief; Victor is confined for months as a madman before beginning his pursuit.
- Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, First Section (examples of acting from duty)
The person who preserves life without loving it after hopeless sorrow, and the philanthropist whose own grief has extinguished sympathy.
- Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on Lazarus
Death and resurrection supply Augustine with a pastoral language for grief, sin, and renewed life.
- Humboldt's Gift, Middle sections
Humboldt's death alone in a Times Square hotel, and Charlie's memory of avoiding him shortly before.
- Humboldt's Gift, Final section
Reburial of Humboldt and his mother.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 15, Herodian family violence
Herod's household murders and suspicions are narrated as political pathology, a non-clinical portrait of fear, rage and moral disorder.
- King Lear, Recognition and loss
King Lear gives this tag concrete force through lear is central for psychiatry and aging: cognitive vulnerability, rage, delirium, homelessness, trauma, blindness, caregiving, and unbearable grief
- Kokoro, Part One
Sensei's monthly visits to K's grave and his gloomy reflections on human nature.
- Kokoro, Part Three
K's suicide in his room and Sensei's discovery of the body and the note.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letter 63
Grief for a friend is acknowledged but disciplined within Stoic limits.
- Little Women, Part Two, Ch. 36 and 40
Beth's slow decline at the seaside and at home; her death nursed by Jo.
- Little Women, Part Two, Ch. 42
Jo's grief after Beth's death and her turn to writing from life.
- Medea and Other Plays, Medea, opening
The Nurse describes Medea refusing food, weeping and turning from her children after Jason’s betrayal.
- Medea and Other Plays, Heracles, madness episode
In a related Euripidean tragedy, Heracles kills his family under divinely imposed madness and awakens to horror.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XIV (October 1863)
Willie's typhoid on the steamer Atlantic, the attending army surgeon's warning, death at the Gayoso Hotel, and Sherman's self-reproach and midnight letter.
- Metamorphoses, Book VI
Niobe, grieving her slaughtered children, turns to weeping stone.
- My Ántonia, Book I (c. Ch. 14–16)
Mr Shimerda shoots himself in the barn; the inquest, the debate over burial and the crossroads grave.
- On Fairy-Stories, Recovery and consolation
On Fairy-Stories gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is oblique: tolkien treats imagination as recovery from dulled perception and as consolation amid suffering rather than as pathology
- On Friendship, 'Of Friendship', closing pages
Montaigne's description of the dull, half-life he has led since his friend's death.
- Our Town, Death and Attention
Our Town gives this tag concrete force through the medical material is quiet but important: doc gibbs, childbirth, mortality statistics, grief, and the care rituals surrounding death
- Persuasion, Vol. I, Ch. 11
Captain Benwick's mourning for his dead fiancée; Anne advises him to read more prose and less poetry.
- Poems, The terrible sonnets
Poems gives this tag concrete force through hopkins is important for melancholia, scruple, exhaustion, vocation stress, and the language of inward suffering before modern diagnostic categories
- Selected Sermons, Sermons on affliction and providence
Calvin frames suffering as a field for trust, correction, endurance, and communal support.
- Selected Sermons, Sermons addressed to the downcast
Spurgeon repeatedly offers consolation to hearers experiencing despair, guilt, grief, and spiritual darkness.
- Selected Sermons, Sermons on assurance and love
Moody's repeated invitation to trust functions as consolation for anxious and grieving hearers.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. II, Ch. 7–9
Marianne's grief after Willoughby's letter: refusal of food, sleeplessness and hysterical weeping, while Elinor attends her.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'Om'
Kamala dies of a snakebite; later, Siddhartha's grief over his son is healed by listening to the river.
- Sixty Stories, 'The School'
A teacher recounts the cascade of deaths affecting his class and the children's questions about death.
- Sixty Stories, 'Views of My Father Weeping'
A son investigates his father's death in a carriage accident while visions of the weeping father intrude.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Roland's death)
Brittain learns that Roland has died of wounds, and later receives his returned kit, still muddy and bloodstained.
- The Aeneid, Book 2
Aeneas narrates the fall of Troy, Priam’s death and the loss of Creusa as survivor testimony.
- The Aeneid, Book 4
Dido’s passion, abandonment, curse and suicide dominate the Carthage episode.
- The Aeneid, Books 9–12
Battle scenes linger over wounds, young deaths and grieving parents.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 50–52
In a drunken quarrel Alexander kills Cleitus, then lies prostrate with remorse for days.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 72
Hephaestion dies of fever after eating against his doctor's orders; Alexander has the physician executed and mourns extravagantly.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Agricola 45–46
Tacitus' lament and address to the dead Agricola, a classical consolation.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, recognition scene
Agave gradually recognizes she carries her son’s head and enters catastrophic grief.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 1.28–1.47
Arjuna's physical and emotional collapse: trembling, dry mouth, burning skin, a reeling mind and refusal to fight.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 2.11–2.30
Krishna's argument that the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead, because the self is eternal.
- The Bible, Genesis 35:16–20
Rachel dies in hard labour giving birth to Benjamin.
- The Brothers Karamazov, Murder and trial
The Brothers Karamazov gives this tag concrete force through its medical material includes epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism, trauma, patricidal obsession, suicidal despair, and the contagious psychology of families
- The Complete Poems, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Whitman's Lincoln elegy turns national mourning into ritualized grief and meditation on death.
- The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 1, opening
Boethius lies grieving in prison until Philosophy appears and diagnoses his condition.
- The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Suffering and anxiety chapters
Descriptions of grief, fear, anxiety, and bodily signs are useful for histories of affect and psychiatry.
- The Iliad, Book 18.22–35
Achilles learns of Patroclus' death: he pours ashes on his head, tears his hair and groans so terribly that Antilochus fears he will cut his own throat.
- The Iliad, Book 19
Achilles refuses food before battle; Athena sustains him with nectar and ambrosia.
- The Iliad, Book 24.1–18
Achilles, sleepless, weeps and drags Hector's body around Patroclus' tomb each dawn.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter V, typical dreams
Dreams of embarrassment at nakedness, examination dreams and dreams of the death of loved persons, leading to the Oedipus and Hamlet readings and the discussion of childhood sexuality and sibling rivalry.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter VII, opening
The dream of the burning child, reported by a patient from a lecture, and Freud's account of how external perception and grief enter a dream.
- The Jewish War, Book 5, Jerusalem under siege
Crowding, corpses, factional violence and the shrinking food supply turn Jerusalem into a public health crisis before the final assault.
- The Jewish War, Book 6, famine in Jerusalem
The famine reaches its most extreme form, including the story of a mother driven to cannibalism, which Josephus uses as a sign of social and bodily collapse.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Phaedo 116a–118a
The bath, the farewell, the friends' weeping, the drinking of the hemlock and the ascending numbness until death.
- The Meek One, Author's preface
Dostoyevsky describes the narrator's state of shock and disordered thinking hours after the suicide.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 3–4
Her jump from the window holding an icon, Lukerya's account, and the narrator's anguish over the body.
- The Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 'A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day'
A meditation on the longest night in which the speaker describes himself as the quintessence of nothingness after a loved one's death.
- The Metaphysical Poets, Henry King, 'An Exequy to his Matchless Never to be Forgotten Friend'
King's elegy for his young wife, longing to join her in the grave.
- The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, opening chapters
Quinn's bereavement, pseudonymous writing life and willingness to answer a call meant for another person set up identity as a fragile compensatory structure.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 17-19
Kriemhild's mourning over Siegfried's body becomes the emotional and political source of the revenge plot.
- The Odyssey, Book 4
Helen mixes a drug into wine that suppresses grief and anger, a striking ancient fantasy of pharmacological emotional control.
- The Odyssey, Book 11
The underworld journey stages grief, memory, sacrificial blood and conversation with the dead.
- The Oresteia, Agamemnon, murder aftermath
Clytemnestra presents the killing as payment for Iphigenia and reveals grief turned into lethal purpose.
- The Oresteia, Libation Bearers, tomb scene
Electra and Orestes perform mourning at Agamemnon’s grave and convert lament into revenge.
- The Oresteia, Eumenides, opening and trial
The Furies embody pursuit, sleepless accusation and blood guilt until redirected by Athena.
- The Secret Garden, Archibald Craven's return
The father's grief and withdrawal are treated through dream, memory and reunion with the recovered child.
- The Theban Plays, Oedipus the King, recognition
Jocasta dies by hanging and Oedipus blinds himself after discovering his birth and crimes.
- The Theban Plays, Antigone, burial conflict
Antigone insists on rites for the dead despite state prohibition, making grief a public act.
- The Theban Plays, Antigone, final messenger speech
Antigone, Haemon and Eurydice die by suicide after Creon’s delayed repentance.
- The Waves, Percival's death
The group absorbs Percival's sudden death as a disruption of shared identity and private desire.
- Thoughts on Government and Selected Letters, Late Adams-Jefferson correspondence
Aging, grief, memory, and mortality shape the retrospective friendship.
- Travels with My Aunt, Opening funeral
Henry's mother's funeral initiates grief, family uncertainty and a late-life identity crisis.
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, A Song of Despair
The closing poem gathers erotic loss into lament, grief and depressive imagery.
- Washington Square, Early Sloper household chapters
Dr. Sloper's grief over his wife and disappointment in Catherine establish a physician-father whose intelligence is emotionally punitive.
- Wuthering Heights, Hindley's decline
Hindley's alcoholism, gambling and violence after Frances's death damage Hareton and the household.
- Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's final days
Heathcliff's visions of Catherine, refusal of food and death show grief as obsessive bodily unraveling.
Quotes
“use the consolations of reason in this case, and you were as good preach ease to one on the rack, and hope to allay, by rational discourses, the pain of his joints tearing asunder”
“At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death”
“my birth cost my mother her life, and was the first of my misfortunes”
“for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves”
“If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I”
“they tell us not of eternal peace alone, of that great peace of 'indifferent' nature; they tell us, too, of eternal reconciliation and of life without end.”
“Put the case that the mind of that philanthropist were clouded by sorrow of his own, extinguishing all sympathy with the lot of others”
Frequently cited
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, They kill us for their sport”
Frequently cited
“Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing”
Frequently cited
“Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow, A herb most bruised is woman”
“I could not help reproaching myself for having consented to his visit in that sickly region in the summer-time”
“Being in the very midst of an important military enterprise, I had hardly time to pause and think of my personal loss”
“The child that bore my name, and in whose future I reposed with more confidence than I did in my own plan of life, now floats a mere corpse, seeking a grave in a distant land, with a weeping mother, brother, and sisters, clustered about him”
“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone”
“Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby”
“Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality”
Frequently cited
“Jesus wept”
Frequently cited
“What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love”
“Father, don’t you see that I am burning”
“Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend; concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best”
“They are all gone into the world of light”
Frequently cited
“Men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled”
“men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony”
Frequently cited
“Therefore wait to see life’s ending ere thou count one mortal blest; Wait till free from pain and sorrow he has gained his final rest”
“terrified Nature seizes upon _madness_ as the last resource of life”
Frequently cited
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”
Frequently cited
“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad”