Death Is The Mother of Beauty, Mystical

One of the things I love about Wicca is its celebration of death and decay. Wallace Stevens, in his poem Sunday Morning, wrote:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

(The Collected Poems, 69)

~Reprinted in Gardens, An Essay on the Human Condition by Robert Pogue Harrison

Photo found here.