Choosing a poem for a funeral

A reading does one of three jobs, and picking the wrong job is how a beautiful poem lands badly.

It consoles — it offers an idea about death that the room can hold onto.

It refuses to console — it says the loss is large and does not soften it. For an unexpected death, or a young one, this is often the honest choice and the one people are grateful for.

It describes — it says something about this particular person: the sea, a garden, work, a long marriage.

Decide which you want before you start reading poems, or you will choose by familiarity instead.

Read it out loud first

The most practical advice on this page. Many poems that are moving on a page cannot be delivered by someone who is struggling — long sentences, difficult line breaks, a stanza that requires breath control you will not have.

Shortlist three, read each aloud twice, and choose the one you can get through.

Four you can use in full

These are out of copyright, so you can print them in a service sheet without permission — which is not true of most twentieth-century poems, and is worth knowing before you reproduce anything.

"Remember" — Christina Rossetti (1862). For someone who spent a long time ill, or who worried about the people they were leaving. It gives permission to be happy again, explicitly, which some families need to hear said aloud:

Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.

"Death is nothing at all" — Henry Scott Holland (1910). The most-read funeral piece in the English language, taken from a sermon. Plain, domestic, consoling. It suits a long life and a settled family, and it does not suit a sudden death — it can sound like it is minimizing.

"Crossing the Bar" — Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1889). Short, formal, a sea image throughout. For someone who was private, or who had a life connected to water.

"Do not stand at my grave and weep" — attributed to Mary Elizabeth Frye (1932). Consoling without religion, which is why it is read so often at secular services. It is also very widely used — if you want something the room has not heard three times before, look elsewhere.

Poems still in copyright

W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues" and Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" are both frequently requested, and both are still in copyright. Reading one aloud at a private funeral is normal practice; printing it in a service sheet or on a website is reproduction, and permissions are handled by the publisher. Most families never check, and most of the time nothing comes of it — but if you are producing something that will exist online, it is worth knowing you are making a choice.

Instead of a poem

A poem is not compulsory. Three alternatives that often land harder:

• Something they wrote. A letter, a card, a birthday message.
• Lyrics read as text, from a song they loved — the same copyright caution applies to printing them.
• A paragraph of plain prose that someone in the family writes. Nothing in an anthology was written about this person; that paragraph was.