Requiem 1
Pour out your light, O stars, and do not hold Your loveliest shining from earth’s outworn shell-- Pure and cold your radiance, pure and cold My dead friend’s face as well.
Ivor Gurney
Pour out your light, O stars, and do not hold Your loveliest shining from earth’s outworn shell-- Pure and cold your radiance, pure and cold My dead friend’s face as well.
Ivor Gurney’s short elegy asks the stars to keep shining on a world that feels exhausted and worn out. The speaker doesn’t want comfort that softens death; he wants the clean, distant light of the night sky. That cold radiance seems to mirror his dead friend’s face—still, pale, and beyond reach.
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