Pan Is Dead
Pan Is Dead - meaning Summary
Ritual Response to Loss
The poem stages a communal mourning for Pan, the rustic god, as maidens attempt a ritual coronal but find the natural world already withered. The repeated announcement Pan is dead
and the speaker’s refusal to rationalize the loss emphasize grief’s incomprehensibility. The piece contrasts ceremonial gestures with the petty cruelty of death, suggesting that ritual cannot restore what seasonal decay and mortality have taken away.
‘Pan is dead. Great Pan is dead. Ah! bow your heads, ye maidens all, And weave ye him his coronal.’ 'There is no summer in the leaves, And withered are the sedges; How shall we weave a coronal, Or gather floral pledges?' 'That I may not say, Ladies. Death was ever a churl. That I may not say, Ladies. How should he show a reason, That he has taken our Lord away Upon such hollow season?'
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