> Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
Am I? When I was 9, I cried the whole night because I realized that thousands of years of future adventures, including space travel and meeting aliens, will go on without me. I got over it.
In that poem notice words like "because", "might have", and "too late". If your words did fork lightning, if your deeds did dance in green bays, if you learned early to not grieve the sun, how does this apply? If you haven't made piece with death early on, what kind of life are you living, and how would merely extending it help? What you consider saintly I consider the mere minimum. My own life is neat, but if compared to all of life, it's a pixel in a movie frame. Why be a stuck pixel?
This probably greatly depends on the person. For instance, John von Neumann, one of the brightest and greatest (though in many ways still very flawed) people I know of, was terrified of death.[1]
Many great people past and present have sought immortality, or at least ways to extend their lives. They did not want to "go gentle in to that good night".[2] This desire to prolong life is so nearly universal in humanity that it has become an archetype (the quest for the water of life). Some people, to be sure, do seek to transcend that desire, and perhaps actually manage to do so, but it happens so rarely that it is often considered evidence of saintliness.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_neumann#Death
[2] - https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-ni...