Title: Famous Last Words | Academy of American Poets
Headings: Famous Last Words
Famous Last Words
Content: As he died, he whispered, “I see black light.” Hugo died on May 22, 1885, and his funeral was a national event; hundreds of thousands of people, including representatives of many other European countries, attended the ceremony and followed the funeral procession through Paris. James Joyce: “ Does nobody understand?” As Joyce is known as one of the most challenging writers in the English language, particularly for his associative, stream-of-consciousness novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, it’s perhaps fitting then that his alleged last words address a failure of comprehension: “ Does nobody understand?” Joyce died on January 13, 1941, in Zurich of a perforated duodenal ulcer, at the age of fifty-nine. John Keats: “ I can feel the daisies growing over me.”