There Is No Death
"There Is No Death" is the first poem, and the only one which possesses the faintest spark of life.
"None of the following poems," says McCreery in his preface, "were originally written for the general public. Most of them, especially the longer ones, were meant only for my own family and a circle of intimate personal friends; whence it results that many of them refer to a greater extent than would otherwise be the case, to myself, my personal experiences, hopes, beliefs, doubts, and feelings . . . Just how much of what seems personal herein is fact, and how much of it is fancy, it will be time enough to tell when I come to write my autobiography."
But that was another task which—like his "great work for humanity"—he never found time for. Instead he seems to have preferred to spend his spare moments tinkering with his one famous poem and trying to expand it, no doubt under the impression that if he could produce some additional verses it would prove that he had also written the original ones. He succeeded in adding six stanzas, which are reproduced in Songs of Toil and Triumph, but they are vastly inferior to the first ones, and his other revisions are all for the worse. What he evidently labored to do was to make the poem more "elegant," and he nearly ruined it in the proc-
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