Category: Graveyards

Sonnet Written in the Churchyard at Middleton in Sussex by Charlotte Smith

 

Pressed by the Moon, mute arbitress of tides,

While the loud equinox its power combines,

The sea no more its swelling surge confines,

But o’er the shrinking land sublimely rides.

The wild blast, rising from the western cave,

Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed;

Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead,

And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave!

With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore,

Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave;

But vain to them the winds and waters rave;

They hear the warring elements no more:

While I am doomed, by life’s long storm oppressed,

To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest.

October Graveyard by Caroline Crosby Wilson

Here, where the decorous corpses lay,
With decent labels at the head,
Monotonous in green array,
A flaming mutiny has spread.
Where proper mourners knelt to pray
The dying dance upon the dead.

Yet the misshapen moon shall white
The scarlet to a silver shift,
And the late traveller’s throat grew tight
To see pale, tortured vapors lift,
And hear vague rustlings in the night,
Where ashen leaves descend and drift.