# Poetry for grieving and the Dove River

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/poetry-for-grieving-and-the-dove-river/274516>\
**Category:** Cafe Society\
**Created:** [November 13, 2004, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/poetry-for-grieving-and-the-dove-river/274516 "2004-11-13T03:02:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![phouka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/c5a1d2/32.png) [@phouka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/phouka)\
**Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/poetry-for-grieving-and-the-dove-river/274516/1 "2004-11-13T03:02:48Z")

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Hello all,

A good friend’s mother recently passed away, and she’s trying to get things set up for the memorial service. There’s poem out there somewhere that she’d like to use with the line “…on the banks of the Dove…” Trouble is, she can’t find it in any of her mother’s poetry collections or her own, and we’ve both tried googling it to no avail.

If you know the poem, would you post the poet’s name and the title? A link would be superduper. If you don’t have either, other suggestions would be lovely. Unfortunately, my favorite refrain from Tennyson’s _Ulysses_ is out, because they used that at her father’s service.

Thanks for your help.

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**Author:** ![Brynda](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e79b87/32.png) [@Brynda](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brynda)\
**Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/poetry-for-grieving-and-the-dove-river/274516/2 "2004-11-13T03:25:36Z")

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I don’t know the one you mentioned, but I love W.H. Auden’s Stop All the Clocks, which can be found here:

[http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/auden.stop.html](http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/auden.stop.html)

When I heard part of it in Four Weddings and a Funeral, I realized that it expressed exactly how I felt when a friend of mine died. I couldn’t understand why the world didn’t stop.