The Classic

The Bible is a common and unsurprising source of epitaph texts for these gravestones.  Epitaphic verse of any sort is comparatively scarce in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century out in these hills.  Short Bible verses were among the first enhancements to these spare memorials, providing a measure of grace.  These passages would have been familiar to the deceased, their survivors, and the community from a lifetime of church attendance.  They were comfortably orthodox and also they were near to hand: a pulpit Bible could be found in every Meeting House, and most families owned one as well. Bible verses also tend to be short and therefore not too expensive to add to a monument.  As a result, you will find something from Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, or the Gospels in any of these graveyards.

In Old Hadley Cemetery there is a sumptuously-carved memorial with an affectionate testimonial to a woman twice married to ministers, capped by a highly appropriate verse from Proverbs: 

The rich language of eighteenth-century hymns and various translations and adaptations of the Psalms provided another common source for epitaphs.  Like Scripture, these verses would have been familiar to the deceased, their surviving families, the stone carver, and the minister.  They were not used just in Church, they were read, memorized, and recited as devotional literature in the home.  In most cases we find a single verse of the hymn -- not necessarily the most joyful, indeed often the most admonishing.  But bear in mind that a single verse would likely have been enough for the devout contemporary reader to recall the whole hymn.

By far the most popular hymnodist I have read in these graveyards is Isaac Watts. I have collected scores of epitaphs that quote Watts’s Hymns, Psalms, and devotional poems. I found this verse in New Marlborough’s Old Center Cemetery; it is mentioned in several books about the Berkshires, always described as ‘quaint’ or ‘curious’ but never sourced:

Bibles and hymnals are unsurprising sources of epitaph texts.  Less expected, perhaps, is poetry.  I have found more than a century’s worth of English and American poetry chosen for these memorials, from heroic to lyric to Augustan to Romantic to satiric.  Some are the work of enduringly famous writers, like William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, and Samuel Johnson.  In fact, one of the unexpected rewards of this project has been encountering these familiar poets in a new and deeply moving context.

For example, in Old Hadley Cemetery, a splendid graveyard tucked in amongst cornfields on the fertile flatlands hard by the Connecticut River, there is a gravestone inscribed with both a fulsome eulogy and a passage from an elegy by Alexander Pope (1688-1744), a poet famous for his elegantly-rhymed ‘heroic couplets’:

This monument is erected
in memory of the Hon.
Eleazer Porter, Esq. who for
many years served the Coun
ty of Hampshire in the impor-
tant Offices of Chief Justice
of the Court of Common Pleas
and Judge of Probate, the
duties of which he performed
with the strictest fidelity.
He died May 27 1797.  AE. 69

This modest stone, what few vain marbles can
May truly say, here lies an honest man:
Calmly he looked on either life and here
Saw nothing to regret or there to fear.
From nature’s temp’rate feast rose satisfyd
Thanked Heaven that he’d liv’d and that he died.

The source is Pope’s On Mr. Elijah Fenton at Easthamstead, Berks, 1729:

This modest stone, what few vain marbles can,
May truly say, Here lies an Honest Man;
A Poet bless’d beyond the Poet’s fate,
Whom Heav’n kept sacred from the proud and great;
Foe to loud Praise, and friend to learned Ease,
Content with Science in the vale of peace.
Calmly he look’d on either life and here
Saw nothing to regret, or there to fear;
From Nature’s temp’rate feast rose satisfied,
Thank’d Heav’n that he had lived, and that he died.

 This is a fine memorial, and a tribute to Pope’s popularity – Porter was clearly a man of considerable standing who merited an expensive gravestone and an extensive epitaph.  In the last line Pope (and whoever composed this epitaph) beautifully articulates the perspective that death is a condition the just should welcome.

The most unanticipated pleasure of my journey has been encountering the elegant, sometimes sublime, and too-often overlooked work of the Graveyard Poets.  This once-popular school of writers played a significant role in the literary and spiritual life of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  They composed contemplative, introspective, elegiac poems using several recurring tropes – an evening visit to a graveyard or a crypt, allegorical characters whose names define their (one-dimensional) characters, and observations of natural phenomena (a storm, nightfall, fields and farms) – to illustrate religious lessons in an easy, accessible way.  Their common themes, which fit perfectly with the prevailing religious sentiment of the day, were the inevitability of death, the uncertainty of its timing, its leveling effect on all rank and privilege, the consequent vanity of our mortal ambitions and pursuits, and the supreme importance of living virtuously in order to secure eternal happiness. 

Highly popular in its time, Graveyard poetry is not so widely read today.  You might be familiar with Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (“the paths of glory lead but to the grave”) but few today read Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair, or Edward Young for pleasure or edification. 

Here is one frequently-chosen example, a passage from Edward Young’s masterwork The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742), that was used twice in Northampton, once nearby Deerfield, then farther east in Brookfield, all over a span of thirty years:

Here lies interr’d
the Remains of
Colo. SETH HUNT
Who died Dec 28th,
1779.   AEtat 31.

Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour,
What, tho’ we wade in wealth, or soar in fame,
Earth’s highest station ends in, “Here he lies;”
And dust to dust concludes her noblest song.

The original text (from Night the Fourth – the book consists of nine Nights) is:

Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour,
What, though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame?
Earth’s highest station ends in, “Here he lies,”
And “Dust to dust” concludes her noblest song.

I hear an echo of Thomas Gray in this passage.  And there is great poetic power in Young’s swift modulation between our heavy, material wading in a pile of metal coins; then soaring into the heights of fame; and finally back to earth and dust – always with the comforting implication that the deceased has lived nobly. 

The works of Young and the other Graveyard Poets became part of the closet devotions of contemporary readers, a meditative pass-time conducted in private to improve one’s spiritual condition.  Choosing one of these poems, which emphasize the joys of salvation more than the risk of damnation, for the epitaph of a departed loved one shows an attitude towards death in which fearful anticipation has diminished and been replaced by acceptance and even longing.

This category consists of epitaphs that appear over and over in these graveyards, across many miles and many years, but for which I cannot determine a particular author or source.  These texts were evidently printed, widely distributed, and read by the people that chose these epitaphs.  I have pored over many eighteenth-century almanacs, epitaph collections, and anthologies of ‘quotable’ poetry, but nowhere have I found these specific verses. The most famous of all these unsourced but recurring epitaphs is “Affliction sore long time I bore”.  The earliest example I have found is in Northfield Center Cemetery, in the 1770s:

Here lies Buried
Mrs. Anne wife of Lieut
Eldad Wright who
Died augst 18 1777
Aged 33 years

Affliction sore long time i bore,
Physicians skill was vain,
Till god did send Death as a friend,
To ease me of my pain

I have found this epitaph so often in these old graveyards that I have stopped collecting examples.  An on-line search of “affliction sore long time I bore” turns up epitaphs everywhere from Yorkshire England in the 1760s (after this appearance in Enfield) to Hong Kong 1872 and everywhere in between. 

It is so commonplace that it became a recognized cliché in popular culture.  Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (May 1869) tells a short joke: an old woman demands that a carver use this on her stone.  He refuses because, he tells her, some other carver has the copyright and he can’t afford to get sued!  Mark Twain winks at it as an example of the profusion of sentimental “Post-Mortem Poetry” in Philadelphia, in The Galaxy (June 1870).  It even appears in David Copperfield, in a reference that Dickens must have expected his readers to recognize: “I look up at the monumental tablets on the wall, and try to think of Mr. Bodgers, late of this parish, and what the feelings of Mrs. Bodgers must have been, when affliction sore, long time Mr. Bodgers bore, and the physicians were in vain.”

Though epically commonplace, its original source has never been identified.  Charles Box, in Elegies and Epitaphs (Gloucester, UK 1892) speaks for us all when he writes: “It seems almost a pity that the author of this epitaph is not remembered among English writers, seeing that the above effusion has had a run of two centuries, and has found a place in probably more than half the churchyards and cemeteries of the kingdom.” Amen to that!

Some of the most engaging and revealing epitaphs I have collected, the ones that make me think hardest about the people who created these memorials, are verses that do not recur at all and do not rely on any identifiable source text.  I call this category “Bespoke” because as far as I can tell these compositions are unique to one individual’s grave, the work of a single writer – usually (though not always) unknown.  We can only speculate on who composed the text and their relationship to the deceased.

In the Buckminster Cemetery in Barre we find this tender long farewell to a beloved daughter of the Soule family of stone carvers:

Memento Mori

In Memory of
Susanna Soule Who was Born at
Plimpton Febry ye 24th 1741
and Decd here Novemr ye 3d 1771
In the 30th year of her Age ~

This pleasant Child in Whom We did delight
Lies here in dust Now Buried from our Sight.
Her tunefull Voice that did Delight our ear
We Now on Earth Shall no more Ever hear
But Still we hoope and trust she’s gone to Sing
Eternal praise to the Eternal King
With Holy pious Job then let us Say
the Lord he gave the Lord he takes away
Twas God who calld her hence Let us be Still
and Learn Submission to his Holy Will
She was with us but now She’s Call’d away
Her glass was run She must no Longer Stay
She’s gone She’s gone and never must return
Untill the Glorious Resurrection Morn.

I have not been able to find any of these lines used elsewhere, so I conclude it is original and bespoke for this grave.  It certainly has the ring of a highly personalized message.  I am not a genealogist, but it appears Susanna did not marry, and predeceased her parents (she was the child in whom we delighted).  The emphasis on her tuneful singing is another sign this verse was composed for a specific individual, and the expression of hope that she is now singing in Heaven is quite moving.  The reference to Job, the orthodox sentiment that her death was God’s will to which we must submit, and the metaphor of the hourglass that has run out, are all familiar.  But the mournful repetition of “she’s gone, she’s gone” is well composed and truly poignant.  This is a fine piece of writing and a highly articulate expression of her parents’ grief.