At little while ago I was in the archives looking for the Order in Council dated 1881 which formally closed the churchyard round the church to new burials. While I was there I had a peek at the burial register for 1792, when John Smeaton was buried. In the front someone had written a few stanzas from what has turned out to be a much longer poem. I reproduced this extract in the November magazine, and I have to admit to making a few minor errors in transcribing the copperplate handwriting. The correct version reads:

Sure ‘tis a serious thing to die! My soul,
What a strange moment it must be, when near
Thy journey’s end, thou hast the gulf in view!
That awful gulf no mortal e’er repass’d
To tell what’s doing on the other side.

Fools that we are!
Never to think of death and of ourselves
At the same time: as if to learn to die
Were no concern of ours.

Thrice welcome death!
That after many a painful bleeding step
Conducts us to our home, and lands us safe
On the long-wish’d for shore.

Robert Blair was a founder of what became known as the ‘Graveyard School’ of poets, chiefly because they concentrate on death, mortality, religion and are rather melancholic in tone. The painter William Blake produced a sequence of 19 watercolours illustrating the poem, which itself became very popular. The poem is regarded as being a key work in the development of the Romantic movement and part of the Gothic revival.

The poem is a bit like the preacher of Ecclesiastes who decides that everything is vanity. We are all going to die - a bit like a theological Frazer from Dad’s Army, ‘we’re all doomed’. It emphasizes our mortality. Everyone faces the same fate and if we are to understand life we have to understand death because the one follows the other as sure as night follows day. Death is the great leveller, which all must face; “The appointed place of rendezvous, where all meet”.

The twist comes towards the end when he has a ‘hang on a moment’ thought. After all the gloomy stuff he points out that the dead do not belong to the grave.

…thou must render up thy dead,
And with high interest too. -- They are not thine,
But only in thy keeping for a season,
Till the great promised day of restitution.

There is something of this in this Eucharist. By coming here this evening, we don’t just gather to commemorate the dead, those whom we have known and wish to remember, even whose memory we might treasure, but we are here to remind ourselves that we will one day join them. Mortality is something we share with them because we share life with them. We are all bound together in the same redemption and therefore the same hope.

The poem talks of the great promised day of restitution. Restitution implies that something has been lost that will be restored, that will be repaid. For some this may have stronger resonances than for others. For some they will know that the ones they remember were diminished towards the end - mentally or physically, even spiritually. This may even be us as we contemplate our own mortality. There may be things that leave us feeling diminished or as though something needs to be restored and we long for the day when God will indeed bring this about. It is our ‘long-wish’d for shore’. There are chronic illnesses that make us aware of our mortality and bring with them a depleting.

Death is serious: “Sure ‘tis a serious thing to die, my soul.” It should not be belittled, in fact the psychologist in me would call that an avoidance and denial. There is a gulf that it traverses and we know the gap it can create only too well. But for all of that it is also perfectly natural and the key to understanding life; indeed we can’t understand life without it. We always live somewhere between the now and the not yet. The now is where we are. The not yet is where we will one day be. As the ‘graveyard poets’ heralded the gothic revival so today we are seeing a revival in Goths and a morbid fascination, which on one level Halloween can be seen to display. Our culture’s avoidance of death leaves no place to deal with the reality we all have to face and it may be that those strangely dressed teenagers are actually engaging with something more profound than we might give them credit for, or even they realise themselves.

Today we face death in the context of life. For it is only because of life that we have death. It is only because of love that we feel its pain. This evening we celebrate the love that brings us life and death and to new life in Christ. There is here a mystery but it is one we all share in and can have profound hope in. The dead do not belong to the grave because we are made for life: the great ‘not yet’ or ‘long-wish’d for shore’, which the now prefigures.

© Ian Black 2005

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