Our greater English poets

Related to remembering my brother's death a year ago, I called to mind some lines by Tennyson, anthologized in Bartlett's Poems for Occasions. This book has poems arranged by theme, and one theme is "Grief and Mourning." Here is the poem:

Break, break, break
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

These lines speak to me partly because I have that sense of wishing I could see my brother and talk to him, but he's just not there, and also because this poem references the brother-sister relationship in, "O well for the fisherman's boy, / That he shouts with his sister at play!"

Why does it help to find poems that express some part of what you feel? I don't know. Just the fact that I wanted to find and read that poem reminded me of a line from a Barbara Pym novel, Some Tame Gazelle, "In the future Belinda would continue to find such consolation as she needed in our greater English poets, when she was not gardening or making vests for the poor in Pimlico."

Here's one more, by Emily Dickinson, almost unbearably apt:

The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth,—

The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.