Forty-Two Poems

“I who am dead a thousand years” sends a song across time to an unknown reader—and asks whether wine, music, love and prayer still belong to the living.

In this early twentieth-century collection, James Elroy Flecker moves from London streets and a French mill village to a town of the dead, where lost voices recall the pleasures they can no longer touch. His poems hold beauty and sorrow close: a vanished lover may still be waiting on Primrose Hill, while a linnet’s song makes ghosts remember the world. Across these shifting scenes, Flecker’s speakers wrestle with longing, mortality and the need to make something that outlasts them. What might a stranger, reading a thousand years hence, hear in their song?

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