De Mortuis

De Mortuis1

There is a graveyard by a solitary wayside, with many an antique tomb in the seclusion of umbrageous yews and willows. A rude wall of flint, the glittering target of the sunbeams, is its barrier against the wild, unconsecrated moorland; a dark tower its ancient sentinel. It is an abandoned garden where flowers meet together without favour – rosemary and nettle, myrtle and lily, and yellow charlock. Green unweeded paths are the waste avenue of its dead. It is the resort of wild bees and yet wilder birds, whose murmur and melody cease only with the twilight, the hour of the owl and the nightjar. There is no sound of lamentation in all its silent ways. A quiet company, country people all, is laid here, who have in stealth departed, and do not return. ‘O Death, O Time,’ cries one, ‘the wicket and the approach!’ The wicket in due season has been unlatched to each; and now none comes: theirs is the wild vacant solitude, theirs the thicket of elder and crimson hawthorn. Moss, and lichen, and stringent ivy weave ever upon their names and legends the immortal web of oblivion.

They found death no unwholesome theme for rhyme, these country people; they knew him of old – a strange whimsical figure enough with his great key, silent yet eloquent, austere, capricious. To die was but to make an end, the ruddy sun on the stubble, the dark wintry staircase to bed; and the tombstone being narrow at best, and transient after all, they did not daub it with flattery, but they put much in little space:

Here lieth alone John Alfred Mole:

He hath burrowed now so deep, poor soul.

the final jest of all, and not quite heartless. You may see ‘Mary Alice Gilmore’ very clearly in her muslin gown:

She came with her garland all in the May morning,

Her face shining fair as the milk in the pail,

But Death walked behind her with yew and with cypress,

And hath lured her away to his house in the vale.

A rain-darked stone, a pace or two beyond, echoes shrilly that desperate cry in the Urn Burial – ‘Even such as hope to rise again …’:

Dig not my grave o’er-deep,

Lest in my sleep

I strive with sudden fear

Towards the sweet air.

Alas! lest my dim eye

Should open clear

To the depth and the weight –

Pity my fear!

Friends, I have such a wild fear

Of depth, and space,

And heaviness, O bury me

In easy place!

He has a friable soil for his rest – too easy, perhaps, if his fear quicken also against the ‘wolf with nails’. Nearby, a vacant man is interred, whose dull ear would scarce have caught the clangour of his own elegiac bells:

HERE LIES THOMAS MATTHEW DALE,

aet: 81 

He lay like to a simple child,

So stealthily old Death drew near;

His intellects were all too dim

T’acquaint his soul with fear.

White as the blackthorn bloom his head,

His voice like a far singing bird,

His hands they trembled like a leaf

By southern breezes stirred.

He seemed a stranger to his frame,

He seemed his spirit was elsewhere gone,

Nor found not any selfsame thought

Of what he gazed upon.

Like jargoning bells blown out of tune,

Yet with a sweetness on the wind,

God leads us young and old about

Just as He hath a mind.

The alien grave of the sailor is in the morning shadow of the low wall, dense with flowering nettles, sated with dew:

Here sleepeth a poor mariner,

And only silence him to cheer:

He pineth for the roaring sea,

Who must in earth so quiet be:

There seemed a voice in the deep sea,

That strange and winsome haunted he.

But the deep sea is beyond the hills, and the wind faint only with the inland sweetness. It might be the quavering voice of Darby McGraw himself complaining of exile.

Thomas Small, a miller, fusty yet of meal, who died in dark February, keeps him company:

        Here lies a Miller;

        Each working day

        He went as white

        As blossoming May:

A goodly thing enough to be

If thy soul do keep thee company;

and a philosophic warrior, his field of valour undecipherable:

This quiet mound beneath

Lies Corporal Pym,

He had no fear of death,

Nor death of him.

Close to the footpaths, so that children must often have fingered the two long ears rudely carved at the upper corners of its leaning stone, is the grave of a mute. Beneath his pollard window of an April evening, Pan pipes luringly – and in vain – as if the blackbirds were singing.

Step soft, good friends, for though a mute,

Silence doth best the sleeper suit.

A mute cares little for the sound of his name: there is scored deep only ‘A.A.’

Under a mound that now scarce would harbour a cherub, a comrade of Falstaff gluts his great body with an intolerable deal of slumber:

Here lies the body of Andrew Haste,

Now in the ground doth go of waste,

If Mr Haste you e’er did see,

Ye’ll know what a terrible waste it be.

Laid a little out of line, three strangers, who could go no farther, solace themselves; the first a rhymeless traveller in a cloak.

Here lies a stranger to this place;

’Twas a windy eve he came upon,

At dusk he opens the tavern door

And with a few words climbs up to his bed;

The red cock up in the morning crew,

But neither he nor the chambermaid

Might rouse the stranger where he lay,

Wrapped in his cloak there still and grey.

The second, a needy fellow with two very memorable ‘e’e,’ serves for the celebration of his benefactors a meek and not unusual office of poverty:

Mistress Mellor hemmed a shroud

For this stranger beggar man;

Peter, Sexton, digs his grave

Comforting as ever he can;

Just rags and bones and greenish e’e

Were all this begger was pardee!

In the dazzling fervour of the summer sun stands an obelisk, evidently a public purchase. Yet, despite its unseemly pallor, it is not out of place, for the unstable earth has fallen away, proving it a very trivial thing. Its legend is certainly not the work of its mason:

Here rests in peace, and security,

         Ann Fell, who was

Cruelly, and foully done to death

         In Milton Fields,

Snow lying deep upon the ground.

         Sleep without fear, sweet Ann,

         Thy murderer cometh not

         To wreak his vengeance

         In this quiet spot.

         Hid in the silver clouds

         The sworded legions move:

         What shall his hate

         ’Gainst legions prove?

         Like glouts of summer dew

         Thy blood shall be,

         Rubies celestial

         For the blest Mary.

The wind ever hums along the jagged flints where lies a leper uncontagious:

Toll ye the Bell, a Leper now is come

To the gate merciful of his long Home;

Like a Paule’s scales his filthy Sores shall be

When heaven’s glory he doth blinking see;

Whiter than Snow his body’s Skin shall shine,

As Moses’ face in Israelitish eyne;

But, when old Dives knocketh, black with Sin,

D’ye think Saint Leper will invite him in?

Time has shown. At the foot of the quiet, windy tower in the deeper grasses is the dust of ‘Elizabeth Page, Spinster’:

Here sleeps a maiden who deceased

On the even before her marriage feast;

All put with sprigs of lavender

Lieth the gown she’ll never wear;

Idle and quite untenanted

Her gloves, her shoes; her nosegay dead;

Yea, even her smock her shroud now is,

And rosemary for love’s caress.

Ah! Wo is me poor piteous bride,

Would we were lying side by side!

One vault there is, stared upon by the attentive gargoyles of the tower. It is large and lichenous, and echoes the note of the bird in its depths.

Fall down upon thy bended knees, O man,

And ’twixt thy restless finger and thy thumb

Roll but a fragment of this crumbling earth,

And know that ev’n to this thou shalt come!

Put thou thy naked hand upon this stone,

Compose thy heart, and in thy fancy see

A form without friend, or comeliness, or power;

Even to this thou too shalt come with me.

For thy bright candle but the dim night worm,

For music the lone hooting of the owl,

The baseness of thy end for reverie:

Oh, in thy pride, consider with thy soul,

While yet thou sojournest ’neath the tree of Life,

Viewing its fruit of evil and of good,

Lest the bright serpent of earth’s rank desire

Be thy companion in this solitude.

Ev’n in this solitude of leaf and flower,

O, lonely man, on thee dark Satan gloats;

Let him not, triumphing at the deep Trump’s blast,

Urge thee to exile with his drove of goats.

One looks up abashed from reading, and far across the purple moors passes a visionary flock with bleatings and cloven tramplings.

A narrow mound of pebbles set in cement, as it were pearls in a brooch, has for its memorial a slab sunken in the wall:

Here lieth our infant Alice Rodd;

         She was so small,

         Scarce ought at all,

But just a breath of sweetness sent from God.

All on her pillow laid so fair,

        White in her clothes,

         Eyes, mouth, and nose,

She seemed a lily-bud now fallen there.

Sore he did weep who Alice did beget,

        Till on our knees

        God send us ease;

And now we weep no more than we forget.

This is the merry gallery of the grasshoppers; they laugh perpetually all day here from blade across to blade, and in the dark evening their cousin, a cricket, creaks prudently from the wall. Perhaps the following is of these three also:

Dear Mother, happy be,

     Thy toil is over,

Thou liest with thy infant,

     And thy lover.

All, all, branch, bud, and root,

      Gold hair, and hoary,

Husband, and wife, and babe,

      Singing in glory.

It was by chance I came upon the ‘natural’s’ tomb, for his oval stone is matted with ivy. I had pursued a flight of magpies into the dense bushes, and so threw the sunlight on his mouldering inscription:

Here lieth a dull natural:

The Lord who understandeth all

Hath opened now his witless eyes

On the sweet fields of Paradise.

He used to leap, he used to sing

Wild hollow notes; now angels bring

Their harps, and sit about his tomb,

Who was a natural from the womb.

He’d whistle high to the passing birds,

With so small store of human words;

He found i’ his own rude company

The peace his fellows would deny.

He’d not the wit rejoiced to be

When Death approached him soberly,

Bearing th’ equality of all,

Wherein to attire a natural.

A long narrow stone had fallen a little asunder in an angle of the wall, and through its crevice bindweed (whose roots strike marvellously deep for so delicate a thing) has sprung up. It puts forth its pale blossoms upon weed, stalk, and stone.

Here lies the body of Madeleine

Wrapped to the throat in a shroud of green;

Daisies her jewels here and there,

A bud at her foot, a bud in her hair;

Her eyelids close, her hands laid down,

Her sweet mouth shut, her tresses brown

On either side her placid face:

Christ of His mercy send her grace!

Three others.

Ruth

V.V. MDCCCXV

Bright eyes of youth look softly on this stone:

Let but a name suffice to character one

Whose earthly beauty was so piercing sweet

It brake the hearts of them that gazed on it:

Here, as if all her Aprils to one end –

The beautifying of her face did tend,

Sleeps she at last where neither flattery

Nor tears nor singing may distinguished be:

And from its lovely and so delicate house

Is passed the spirit: all that ravished us

Lies here at end, even her loveliness,

And the sweet bird cometh to songlessness.

The last of a Spaniard:

Laid in this English ground

A Spaniard sleepeth sound.

Death heedeth not man’s dreams,

Else, friend, How strange it seems,

This alien body and soul

Should reach at last this goal.

Well might the tender weep

To think how he doth sleep,

Strangers on either hand,

So far from his own land.

O! when the last trump blow,

May Christ ordain that so

This poor Spaniard arise

’Neath his own native skies:

How bleak to wake, how dread a doom,

To cry his sins so far from home.

To the living:

What seek ye in this old Churchyard?

       The dead are we,

The forgotten dead who, dead long since,

Close together in silence laid,

Find death sweet we once thought sad,

And peace the last felicity,

        The dead are we.

What shall we find in this sad Churchyard?

        Cypress and yew,

Dark shadows upon Time and signs

Of death by day, how many days!

How many starry nights they raise

Their gloomy branches grey with dew

        Cypress and yew!

Why will ye leave this still Churchyard?

         Here is sweet rest.

On earth there is no rest for man.

Love is not rest, nor toil, nor faith;

But only faith will sweeten death

When the heart pants in the tired breast

         For death and rest.

The briefest of all, upon a dark vault, ancient and gaping, without date or name: ‘O Aprille month!’ A great house for such a little body.

It is a faithful servant of the seasons, this untended graveyard. In spring the almond and the resinous elder hang over against the grave of the natural, with an extraordinary alertness, like an archer with bow bent; in summer the wine-sweet wild rose, the echoing cry of the bird; and so to autumn and winter-brown leaves, and twigs, and snow. Time will efface all record soon. Its narrow wall is ruinous, scarce hindering even now the wandering sheep from trespass, and surely no obstacle to pucks and gnomes that hoot and squeal above its recumbent stones. Perhaps, but for its abundance and its solitary tower, it will presently be at one again with the wild and broomy moor.

1 First published in Pall Mall Magazine, September-December 1901, ‘by Walter Ramal’; later published in Eight Tales, ed. Edward Wagenknecht, Sauk City, Wisconsin, 1971. See also ‘Lichen’ and ‘Winter’ (DDB (1924)), which have epitaphs in common.