Simplify Me When I'm Dead: Poems Selected by Ted Hughes: Poet to Poet

"Remember me when I am dead"
"and simplify me when I'm dead."

"As the processes of earth"
"strip off the colour and the skin"
"take the brown hair and blue eye"

"and leave me simpler than at birth"
"when hairless I came howling in"
"as the moon came in the cold sky."

from "Simplify me when I'm dead"
By the time he was killed in Normandy in June 1944, at the age of only twenty-four, Keith Douglas had achieved a body of work that singled him out as the most brilliant and promising English poet of World War II. While his early poems deal with the wonder and pain of love, his later poems are focused on the misery and brutality of war and death. His body of work still conveys a rare immediacy and youthful power, marked as Ted Hughes wrote in his introduction by a "burning exploratory freshness of mind.""