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Noted Nest

Revisiting Graveyard School of Poetry

Updated: Oct 2

By Kasturi Sinha



And you, my father, there on the sad height

Curse; bless me now with your fierce tears I pray

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage against the dying of the light (Thomas)


The above lines from the famous poem Do not go Gentle into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas is the urging villanelle written for Thomas’ father who already had his one foot in grave and was breathing his last. The message that Thomas was conveying to his father through this poem is that, Thomas doesn’t want his father to submit before the death. He wants him to give a tough fight against the dying day of light. Thomas is completely against the submissive attitude incarnated by his father towards death; he wants him to rage against death and did not want him to accept his death so undeniably. Death is painful, a paralysis to human life and existence. Even though it is said that one will get heaven after one dies but death has always been portrayed as a painful end of life. These Graveyard poets tried to show the real nature of death. They wanted to teach the readers that knowing how to die is nothing but then knowing how to live the rest of the life is. Though, these poets glorified death but they never tried to depict the mysterious nature of death. The portrayal of mysterious nature of death sows the seed of fear and an inglorious image in the minds of the readers. The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears. Even for them who feel death may be the greatest good that can happen to them, they also fear death because of the merciless nature of the death. The graveyard poets tried to show death as a greatest leveller and try to magnify its characteristics of monotony and inevitability.

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay (Rossetti)

The above lines in the poem Remember (Rossetti) by Christina Georgina Rossetti sketches the poetic picture of death and grave which shows the same quality i.e. of inevitability. Here her normal emotion is patched together to give it a poetic sense and here she communicates her feelings better and her pain is filtered through her writing. The tussle and pain of saying goodbye is felt all through the poem but it punctures our heart when we listen or read the line “when you can no more hold me by my hand” (Rossetti). The researcher finds that rather than prose the poetry on death and grave is even more agonizing and traumatic to hear because it conveys the original text with a rhythm. It is a transformation of feeling into a language and a way of saying more in less. It is just like the floating letter in a closed lid bottle which is sent out towards a future reader and the one who opens it becomes the addressee of that literary text. Poetry can create that emotional impact on the readers by piercing their psyche and purging out pity and fear. Poetry according to the American Wordsworth, Robert Frost is, “where an emotion found its thought and the thought has found the words”. Few such poetic lines were found on the gravestone of the people which expresses gratitude, love and affection from their loved ones; like on the grave of John Keats inscribed, “all that was mortal of a Young English Poet who on his death bed...malicious power of his enemies desired their words... on his tombstone - Here lies one whose name was writ in Water”. 

Traditionally the gravestone or tombstone were located in caves, underground; like Mummies in the Egypt’s ‘Pyramid’ or in structures designed specifically for the purpose of containing the remains of the deceased, whose soul would live in another realm. Tombs have always been considered the dwellings of the dead and every tomb ever constructed was build with this concept in mind. Tombs probably arose from prehistoric practice of burying but eventually they were replaced with graves and funerary urns; and the practice of building these tombs for demised was during the Renaissance. In most of the cases the name of the deceased, his date of birth and date of death were inscribed along with the sorrowful personal message and prayer, they may also contain pieces of funerary art and details in stone relief. Originally, a tombstone was the stone lid of the coffin or one can even say it was the coffin itself, and the gravestone was the stone slab that was laid over the grave. Sometimes, it was also called as- ‘headstone’ because it lied on the temple of the coffin. But today all of these terms are used in an alternative to each other. Some graves in Pre-romantic period contained footstones to distinguish the foot end of the grave. This further got develop into full curb sets that marked the whole perimeter of the grave. Footstones were annotated more than the deceased’s initials and the year of birth and death.

Graves and the related shrine or memorials were the focal point for mourning and remembrance. The small quotations, small expressions of grief and sorrow which reminds the people of their dear ones on All Souls Day, a day in which all the deceased relatives and all the holy and faithful souls are remembered. This day is considered as ‘the pray for dead’ day. England that time was in its crudeness. It was unpolished of a comfortable life as it is today. Poverty was the cup of tea and division of class system was an increasing trouble. Since the gravestone and the land in a cemetery or churchyard valued money, they also became the symbol of hierarchy or prominence among the people of elite class in the community. Construction of graveyard and to engrave different quotation on that was initially practiced by the elites. Slowly, it has been filtered down to non- elites and ultimately it became the part of the culture of a community. As culture varies from society to society, the dysphoric quotations also vary from societies. This indicates the variability of culture between the societies and within the same society in two different time frames. The inscriptions craved on graves eventually turned into finest flower of melancholic literature, during the Pre-Romantic period. Slowly from lines to stanzas, it gave metamorphosis to a school of poetry just as a small stream meets the river, mingling with the sea and ultimately becoming a tributary of ocean. The Graveyard school of poetry thus emerged as a reaction to the regimentation of Neo-classicism and as foreshadowing the Romantic spirit which gave birth to the people who focused on human mortality.

Graveyard poetry emerged during Pre-romantic era. This poetry was composed during the French Revolution which marks the end of Neo- Classicism and beginning of   Romanticism, now the poets started thinking much about the life of individual being than emphasizing on the materialistic world. Life and even death of common man have been celebrated by poets like Thomas Gray and others. And this category of literature was one of the genres which spoke about not only life but even the death of common people. The world’s most read poetry in all anthologies The Elegy Written in Country churchyard (Gray) by Thomas Gray is considered as the poetry which celebrated death with an universal appeal where Gray has tried to personify death as the greatest equalizer who judges every individual on same platform and by doing so he wants the elite society not to be proud of their possession by stating the line: “the path of the glory leads but to the grave” (Gray). Even today it is the most relevant, read and widely quoted poems of English language. The very opening lines of the poem set the theme of the death: 

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me. (Gray)

Here the poem invokes the classical idea of memento mori, a Latin phrase which states plainly to all mankind, “Remember that you must die”.  Initially all the sombre and pensive poems which lamented on loss of life, darkness, awful, morose, stinging or ghastly incidents were tagged as  infection of  Elegiac poetry. If one analyse the content of Elegy then he can find, Elegy was not the extreme type of dejected poetry, but very often there was a mourning strain in it. It was during the sixteen century that Elegy has come to mean a poem of mourning for an individual or a lament for some tragic event, like Spenser’s elegy on death of Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Carew’s elegy on John Donne, John Cleveland’s on Ben Johnson, Milton’s Lycidas (Milton), Pope’s Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (Pope) and many more. It does have the subject of death, war, love but it does not always speak of the graveyards or cemeteries. Still some critics consider genre of Elegy as a high water mark of Graveyard School of Poetry. When this is an already declared School of Poetry, then it does have an individual identity, it does not need a trademark to prove itself. It speaks completely about grave and afterlife, about the ashes and the cremation, about the worms eating the rotten mortal part and the kin’s writing on the gravestone. 

Death is something, which is painful than any other grief in this world and pre-mature death is even more painful because it takes the body with it and removes a person from the community permanently. Nothing can come out more bad than death to a person. Hence, the near and dear ones gather together to mourn upon the bereaved families. It is intense in itself to read or feel the imagery “while some affect the sun, and some affect the shade, gloomy horrors of tomb, hollow tombs, rude wind, midst skulls, coffins, epitaphs, worms, lone churchyard, about the departed spirits and the dead man who come again in the poem Grave (Blair); which is one of the longest of graveyard poems written in blank verse by the Scottish poet, Robert Blair also became a major brick in the process of building Gothic Novel. The solemn heaps of fate, trembling light, heaves of crumbling ground, images of ghosts rising up from their graves in The Night Piece on Death (Parnell) gave the insights to the readers that how meaningful life is and further transcending the phenomenon says, death is just the conjuring dark which is not to scare us rather it is to relief us from the prison of life (Christian faith) taking us to the light of heaven. Later, such poems got separated and established themselves in the title of ‘Graveyard Poetry’. The Graveyard Poetry contemplated on “the joy of gloom, the fondness for bathing one’s temples in the dank night air and the musical delight of the screech owl’s shriek” (Phelps). Maybe none must have thought, this collection of bemoan poems, one day will burst the earth and unveil the shades to turn into a separate school of poetry and become ‘The Graveyard School of Poetry’. These sentiments squeeze out echoing of the mid-eighteenth century which was found as a striking parallel between fragmentised structure and human life. The Graveyard poets also came to be known as the churchyard poets because in the Christian community, graveyards were located in the backyard of the church. Since time immemorial, the ground of the Church was considered, the most sacred of all. The essence of these poets remained in the atmosphere between 1740 and 1790. 

The Pre-romantics tried their best to give a poetic sense to these common thoughts in the theme of death. It focuses on reality and does not try to mask the poem with virtual lies. Their morbid, fatalistic and solitude nature in the poem were used as a tool to instruct and lead the individuals to contemplate which moreover created a storm in poetic world. But in the Victorian Era unfortunately it received no attention from the readers and poets. It did not know in which way the wind was blowing. And the situation became so worse that it brought a blind spot to this genre of literature. One can say, these poems were the short-lived mania with a little lasting credit but yes, it also got a great paradigm shift when the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and the world war poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon has breathe the new life into graveyard poetry by using the theme of death throughout. The changing religion practices were seen which increased the reliance on printed material. William Law in his book A serious call to Devout and Holy Life (Law) said, “It is for want of this intention that you see men who profess religion, yet live in swearing and sensuality”. The reading practices which were concerned with parallel reassessment of poetic domination failed soon. And the effect of this private devotion got buried and decayed in the criminating grounds.

 Critics criticized saying, “Graveyard poetry a disease” while others called their poem unoriginal and said that, “the poets were better than their poetry”. The characteristics and style of these poems were not unique to them because the critics said, “the same theme and tone are found in ballads and odes”.  The severe criticism and fear of failure made these poets not to publish many of their poems. Although the majority of the reader said negative about the poems, Edward Young wrote his poetry with the preface to fully original work, his poem Night Thoughts (Young) became very popular. Even the other fourteen poets including William Collins, Robert Blair, Christopher Smart, Thomas Percy, Thomas Parnell, William Cowper and others stood to make Graveyard Poetry, a great success. They formed a small bracket of poets whose given literary names stood for the theme of their works. The graveyard poems were a perfect other in a didactic median to the renouncing funeral sermon which aesthetically promotes the personal meditation upon death and dead. The theological culture of mid-eighteenth century embraced the self devotion as well as the funeral sermons. These conditions demanded a fresh text with which people could contemplate on life and death. The Graveyard School thus met that need, and the poems became quite popular removing the tag of ‘the melancholic and darkest face of literature’. But if we examine the Contemporary poets, they are very much deviated from this theme because in today’s scenario life is just an entity and death is considered to be its part and parcel.


CONCLUSION:

This is a small attempt of researcher to revive an old School of Poetry. One small step towards this School of Poetry may be a gigantic leap in future for studying this literature. Hope the other researchers may take more initiative to contribute to this School. This School of Poetry involves emotions, sentiments and torment inclination towards the sufferings which may touch the heart of writers and poets who can express the feelings of members of the grief-stricken catastrophic family through their pen. The woeful atmosphere, the desolate situation after the death of a member of the community will definitely produce many intense poems to strengthen this ‘School of Thought’.


By Kasturi Sinha




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