Suggested poems or quotes to include in a eulogy?

Question

I have to write a eulogy and i need a poem or quotes to add into the piece? Please help!

Answer 1

Can you tell us something about the deceased? fit the person are generally far more meaningful than general stuff.  

I remember that my cousin was very disappointed when they didn't play Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven at his brother's funeral, but I don't know if that's helpful at all.  

I know that many mourners love Mary Fye's poem, "Do not stand at my grave and weep"

Answer 2

I read this at my grandmother's funeral:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the diamond glint on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning hush,

I am the swift, uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circling flight.

I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.

I am not there, I do not sleep.

Do not stand at my grave and cry.

I am not there, I did not die.  

Answer 3

Some famous, and powerful, elegiac poems are:

"Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden

"To the Dead" by Frank Bidart

"Fugue of Death" by Paul Celan

"Because I Could Not Stop For Death" by Emily Dickinson

"Dying Away" by William Meredith

"To an Athlete Dying Young" by A. E. Housman

"Death Stands Above Me" by Walter Savage Landor

"The Reaper and the Flowers" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"For the Union Dead" by Robert Lowell

"Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Elegy for Jane" by Theodore Roethke

"November" by Edmund Spenser

"Question" by May Swenson

"In Memoriam" by Lord Alfred Tennyson

"A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" by Dylan Thomas

"O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman