Of or pertaining to funerals; funereal.
It’s funny how memory gets jumbled. “Exequial” is a dictionary-only word that reminds me of Tennyson’s poem The May Queen, a poem I read as a teenager and which impressed me most for its references to human burial. That poem may have been my first encounter with the idea of graveyards and the reality of death, and I think its gentle melodrama informed my directionless emotional hyperventilations as a gawky youth.
I had thought that The May Queen contained the word “bier,” referring to a coffin, but my full reading of that poem from pages 239-242 of the Library of World Poetry, edited by William Cullen bryant, shows no appearance of that word. Other exequial words abound in that poem, but my long-time belief that I first learned the word “bier” from The May Queen is now proven wrong.
I hate it when that happens, when the pithy and inconsequential stuff of my life turns out to be anything from a misunderstanding to an outright lie. I don’t know why I would have lied to myself about this foggy memory except that I may have been attempting to fortify the significance of that poem in my mind by assigning it virtues and significances it never possessed.
