Away With Funeral Music
AWAY with funeral music - set The pipe to powerful lips - The cup of life's for him that drinks And not for him that sips.
Robert Louis Stevenson
AWAY with funeral music - set The pipe to powerful lips - The cup of life's for him that drinks And not for him that sips.
Stevenson’s speaker bursts in with a command: stop that mournful funeral music. Right away, you feel the impatience, the refusal to be somber. Instead, he demands a pipe set to “powerful lips”—something bold, breathy, alive. The poem pivots on a contrast between two ways of living.
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