Parnell's Night-Piece on Death, Part 4: The Ending

The yew tree, a house of bones, cackling ravens, and a shocking revelation from Death Incarnate.

These are just a few of the genre conventions you’ll find in tonight’s episode of…

18th Century Graveyard Poetry:
Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death
Thomas Parnell, 1718 (published posthumously in 1722)
Part 4: The Ending

[Heads up: This is my fourth installment on Graveyard Poetry. For the first entry, go here.]

Since this is 2020 and a series of disasters have prevented me from posting this in a timely manner, let me begin with a quick recap of the previous entries: Our dear narrator, sick and tired of poring over the Classics by candlelight, steps outside for a midnight stroll in the churchyard, hoping for a flash of insight, a moment of clarity. As he passes the gardens, the church, and the graves, he realizes that the only certainty in life… is death.

Then there was the business about unmarked coffins made from wiener-roasting sticks, signifying that the departed poor end up nameless and forgotten. Middle class folks get proper gravestones at least, and the rich and famous are laid to rest in elaborate tombs. As our narrator contemplates the human ego, a host of ghosts bursts from the earth and urges him to consider instead the meaning of his own inevitable end.

And now, in contrast to previous entries, I’m going to put the poetry first and let Death speak for Itself. So let’s jump right in, and I’ll see you on the other side.

     Now from yon black and fun'ral Yew,

That bathes the Charnel House with Dew,

…On second thought, let me explain a couple of things.

First of all, throughout western Europe the yew tree has long been closely associated with death and funerals. The yew can live for thousands of years, and wherever its sagging limbs touch the ground, they grow roots and begin life anew. What’s more, the yew serves as a wonderful example of Nature’s sense of humor, since this long-lived tree’s needles and seeds are fatally poisonous.

And how about the charnel house, built near the ancient yew? Back in the good ol’ days, a churchyard cemetery in a crowded city would be accompanied by an outbuilding called a charnel house. Grave sites came with a five-year lease, after which the gravediggers would dig up the grave to make room for paying customers, and they would chuck any bones they found into the charnel house. These buildings were also common in dry, windy places where the topsoil refused to stay put. Can you imagine going out for a stroll to check for storm damage—and finding human bones strewn about the ground? If that seems preposterous, remember that bodies were often buried without any form of embalming, in woven coffins made of sticks—or without any container at all—with no regulations as to depth.

Here I’ll include a short glossary for some of the more obscure terms you’ll encounter in the third stanza:

*** A Quick Glossary ***

sable stoles = fur scarves

cypress tree = a symbol of mourning

mourning poles = flags at half mast

weeds = a woman’s black mourning gown

pall = a cloth covering draped over a casket

escutcheon = an ornamental shield displaying a coat-of-arms

The important thing here is to think about how attitudes surrounding war, death, and mourning are culturally constructed. We’ve all been raised with certain beliefs surrounding death, and when it happens we are expected to react accordingly. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

And so, with imagery of unearthed bones in mind, let’s see what Death has to say on the matter:

     Now from yon black and fun'ral Yew,

That bathes the Charnel House with Dew,

Methinks I hear a Voice begin;                  55

(Ye Ravens, cease your croaking Din,

Ye tolling Clocks, no Time resound

O'er the long Lake and midnight Ground)

It sends a Peal of hollow Groans,

Thus speaking from among the Bones.      60

     When Men my Scythe and Darts supply,

How great a King of Fears am I!

They view me like the last of Things:

They make, and then they dread, my Stings.

Fools! if you less provok'd your Fears,      65

No more my Spectre-Form appears.

Death's but a Path that must be trod,

If Man wou'd ever pass to God:

A Port of Calms, a State of Ease

From the rough Rage of swelling Seas.     70

     Why then thy flowing sable Stoles,

Deep pendent Cypress, mourning Poles,

Loose Scarfs to fall athwart thy Weeds,

Long Palls, drawn Herses, cover'd Steeds,

And Plumes of black, that as they tread,   75

Nod o'er the 'Scutcheons of the Dead?

     Nor can the parted Body know,

Nor wants the Soul, these Forms of Woe:

As men who long in Prison dwell,

With Lamps that glimmer round the Cell,  80

When e'er their suffering Years are run,

Spring forth to greet the glitt'ring Sun:

Such Joy, tho' far transcending Sense,

Have pious Souls at parting hence.

On Earth, and in the Body plac't,             85

A few, and evil Years, they wast:

But when their Chains are cast aside,

See the glad Scene unfolding wide,

Clap the glad Wing and tow'r away,

And mingle with the Blaze of Day.           90

…Do you see? Do you see what Death is telling us? If the thought of our own moment of passing upsets us so much, then why are some of us so ready to make war, or at least to wish death upon our enemies? And conversely, if we understand death as a transition from a life of hardship and chaos to a state of eternal grace, why do we bemoan the deaths of our loved ones, with black garb and sad rituals? The dearly departed are free now, released from all pain—and their bodies and souls care not for these earthly symbols of our jealous despair.

And thus concludes our first foray into the world of 18th Century Graveyard Poetry, a school of thought in which the melancholy intelligentsia of the 1700s dwelt on morality and mortality, on what it means to live a good life—and to meet a good Death.

Until next time,
Jon

Parnell's Night-Piece on Death, Part 3

Ever wonder why hot dogs are called hot dogs? And, what do they have to do with funerals? I know the answers to these questions, and now you will too, thanks to the 18th Century Graveyard School. Or, not quite—because in Graveyard Poetry, as it often goes in life, there are always more questions than answers, and we’ll probably never know the complete truth.

[Heads up: This is the third installment of my series on Graveyard Poetry. For the first entry, go here.]

If you look up the word hot dog, you’ll find that people used to make jokes about the meat that was on sale at the local butcher shop, saying that the cheapskate butcher filled his sausages with dog meat. Hah hah, very funny. But if you look up the dogwood plant, which is sort of a bush that grows in clusters of thin hard stalks, you’ll find that people used to cut down these dogwood stalks and sharpen them into skewers for cooking, which they called dags, because back in the 1600s the word “dag” meant stab or pierce, as in, “Verily I will dag thee with this dagger.”

So the butcher’s errand boy or whoever would come home with a stack of these dogwood switches and they’d sharpen them into long wooden daggers. Then they’d stick sausages on the end and hold ‘em over the fire—and there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: hot dags. The term is referring to the stick, not the meat.

…Maybe. We can’t be sure, because there’s no record of anybody ever writing down the word “dagwood.” But then again, there probably weren’t a lot of lettered scholars double-majoring in butchery and horticulture back in those days.

At any rate, plants that give us these tough-yet-flexible strips, such as the dogwood and the willow, are sometimes called “osier.” (Pronounce it however you want, I don’t care). And osier is what wicker is made of, as in wicker furniture, wicker baskets… and wicker caskets.

That’s right, caskets or coffins made out of those thin strips of dogwood or willow were apparently cheaper than other more-durable options. That’s the imagery our graveyard poet is conjuring up in the opening line of tonight’s episode of:

18th Century Graveyard Poetry

Episode 3: Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death, Verses 3-6.

Thomas Parnell

1718 (published posthumously in 1722)

Keep in mind that our narrator, unable to focus on his studies, is out for a midnight stroll in a graveyard beside a moonlit church. We’re about to pass through three distinct zones in the cemetery. Something that you’ll notice, besides the wicker caskets, is that the grammar here all backwards is.

     Those Graves, with bending Osier bound,

That nameless heave the crumbled Ground,  30

Quick to the glancing Thought disclose

Where Toil and Poverty repose.

As you can see, this is one long sentence with the parts moved around. Rebuilding the structure might be kind of fun, let me give it a go:

"Quick to the glancing thought, those nameless graves, bound with bending osier that heaves the crumbled ground, disclose where toil and poverty repose."

And in plain modern English:

“Judging by these unmarked half-exposed wicker boxes, I’d say we found the working-class stiffs.”

Moving on, it will help to know that the word “Sett” was just a smarmy way of writing “set.” So translating “Sett of Friends” to millennial slang we might get “squad.”

     The flat smooth Stones that bear a Name,

The Chissels slender help to Fame,

(Which e'er our Sett of Friends decay           35

Their frequent Steps may wear away.)

A middle Race of Mortals own,

Men, half ambitious, all unknown.

The grammar here is harder to parse, the meaning more ambiguous, but the idea is that middle-class folks can afford to have their names engraved on tombstones. The stone-carvers give the deceased their names, but the surviving friends literally damage the names with their frequent visits, touching and even (perhaps inadvertently) stepping on the graves. (Remember that smaller gravestones are placed directly into the ground, facing upwards.) Unfortunately these people will never be known outside of their own little circles.

     The Marble Tombs that rise on high,

Whose Dead in vaulted Arches lye,              40

Whose Pillars swell with sculptur'd Stones,

Arms, Angels, Epitaphs and Bones,

These (all the poor Remains of State)

Adorn the Rich, or praise the Great;

Who while on Earth in Fame they live,         45

Are sensless of the Fame they give.

I think we all know who that was about. Class struggle will be a common thread running throughout graveyard poetry, the idea being that despite their fame and fortune, ultimately members of the ruling class will end up just like everybody else: dead.

     Ha! while I gaze, pale Cynthia fades,

The bursting Earth unveils the Shades!

All slow, and wan, and wrap'd with Shrouds,

They rise in visionary Crouds,                    50

And all with sober Accent cry,

Think, Mortal, what it is to dye.

Cynthia was an ancient Greek name for the Moon, and anyone who’s played Magic: The Gathering knows that Shades are ghosts. So now we’re getting to the good stuff: Rising up from the crumbling ground, a crowd of ghosts begs us to contemplate the meaning of death—and in so doing, to re-evaluate the ways we live our lives.

So think of that, next time you eat a hot dog.

And stick around for the next installment of my series on 18th Century Graveyard Poetry, where we’ll work our way through the ending of Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death, in which the very personage of Death Itself comes forth to berate all humankind over the glorification of war and murder.

By the way, if you’re as interested in old words as I am, you can’t go wrong with the website Etymology Online, found at http://www.etymonline.com. And no, they aren’t paying me to say this.

See you next time,

-Jon

Parnell's Night-Piece on Death, part 2

Argent, charnel, osier, sable, zeugma.

What do these words have in common?

I had to learn all of them on my first day in the Graveyard School of Poetry.

*** This is the second installment of my series on Graveyard Poetry. For the first entry, go here.

This was not an actual school in the modern sense, referring instead to a style of English poetry that emerged in the early 1700s and lasted until roughly 1785. The poets were all deeply religious men. Most of them knew Latin, half of them were preachers, and quite a few were named Thomas. (A coincidence I’m sure, but it makes me laugh.)

Graveyard poetry, which is characterized by the melancholic contemplation of mortality, can be seen as a response to the extravagance and corresponding moral decline generally attributed to the intrusion of mainland Catholicism into English culture.

I learned most of what I know about Graveyard Poetry in an elective course on the topic that I took on a whim when I went back to school for writing. In that class and elsewhere, I have studied the religious turmoils of England and western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries in greater depth than your average Wisconsinite, although I’m no expert. I myself was raised Catholic, although I no longer consider myself as such. Being a practicing atheist, I disagree with the Graveyard Poets’ reasoning as to why we should live our lives in the ways that they suggest, but I’ve seen enough moral corruption and shameless accumulation of wealth in my short life to see the merits of their sermons. These poems contain some of the most profound ideas I’ve ever encountered, and that’s why I want to share them with you all.

So let’s keep going, shall we?

Today I’m looking at the second verse of Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death, from 1722. Here it is—and you’ll remember that our narrator has just stepped out of his house into the cold night air.

     How deep yon Azure dies the Sky!
     Where Orbs of Gold unnumber'd lye,     10

The rules of spelling were different in those days, evidenced by the reversal of the letters i and y in “die” and “lye,” which of course are now spelled “dye” (as in, to change color) and “lie” (to lie down, to wait). The uncountable golden orbs are the stars in the sky, which must have been incredible to see in the time before electric light pollution.

     While thro' their Ranks in silver pride
     The nether Crescent seems to glide.
     The slumb'ring Breeze forgets to breathe,
     The Lake is smooth and clear beneath,
     Where once again the spangled Show     15
     Descends to meet our Eyes below.

Imagine how it must have felt to see the same unbelievable star-scape reflected in the surface of the lake.

     The Grounds which on the right aspire,
     In dimness from the View retire:
     The Left presents a Place of Graves,
     Whose Wall the silent Water laves.          20
     That Steeple guides thy doubtful sight
     Among the livid gleams of Night.

Parnell, who was in fact a preacher as well as a poet, is setting the scene for his midnight epiphany: on the right there’s a garden, too dark to see now. On the left the lakeshore leads to a cemetery. The church itself is front and center, but we won’t be going inside.

     There pass with melancholy State,
     By all the solemn Heaps of Fate,
     And think, as softly-sad you tread          25
     Above the venerable Dead,
     Time was, like thee they Life possest,
     And Time shall be, that thou shalt Rest.

To die is every human’s fate, and after a burial, the dirt of the grave is displaced upwards by the body of the deceased, resulting in a slight mound or heap. Walking past these Heaps of Fate you realize: there was a time when these people were alive… and like them, your own time will be over soon enough.

…And that’s all the time I have for Graveyard Poetry today. But don’t worry—there’s MUCH more to come. As you will see, poems from the Graveyard School can be quite long (one of them is a shocking 801 lines). I will cover the remainder of this poem in two more installments, and I plan to share about four more after that.

Until next time,
-Jon

Graveyard Poetry: First Post

One of the earliest Graveyard Poems was Thomas Parnell's Night-Piece on Death, published posthumously in 1722. I'll be looking at the whole thing in depth over the next few days. Here are the first eight lines:

     By the blue Tapers trembling Light,
     No more I waste the wakeful Night,
     Intent with endless view to pore
     The Schoolmen and the Sages o'er:
     Their Books from Wisdom widely stray,        5
     Or point at best the longest Way.
     I'll seek a readier Path, and go
     Where Wisdom's surely taught below.

So far, fairly obvious. The first thing to notice is that the writing does not follow modern rules for capitalization or punctuation. Going forward we will also see irregular spellings and archaic vocabulary. Our narrator has a candle, he's been studying, he's sick of reading the classics, thinks he's better off learning for himself. In the last line when he says "below," he means both down the front steps into the pitch black night, and below ground level, where the bodies are. Content warning: if death is a touchy subject for you, you should probably avoid the Graveyard School of Poetry.

More soon,
-Jon

Camp Nano April 2020: Stay in the Tent Edition

Well everybody, it's that time of year again: you guessed it, Jon's favorite time of the year: Nano! Which of course is short for Nanowrimo, which in turn is short for National Novel Writing Month. Which is, and always has been, the month of November. In fact, some of you may remember that I already wrote 50k words of rough draft material for this book JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO, so why am I doing it again?! This may come as a surprise, but there are now three different national novel writing months, every single year. YAY!!!!!

I'm in a virtual writing group on there called Magic Crystals, and it's for people writing sci-fi stories with any kind of weird technology that lets you explain away all sorts of awesome $#!+. The point is, I've been writing quite a bit on the message board over there, and I just had a great idea: I should post some of that over here as well. So here's what I was writing about tonight (after a brief run at my Nano project, of course).

The thing is, people on Nano are always talking about word sprints and writing prompts. But those have never really been my style. When I went back to school for writing a few years ago I learned about something much better for me: the in-depth writing exercise. These things blow those silly little prompts out of the water.

Here's my favorite one, one that I use all the time: it's called 100 Sentences. Write your story, chapter, or scene in 100 short, simple sentences. If you tend to think in long sentences with multiple clauses, learn to break it up into shorter chunks. You can put them back together later, in editing. Right now we only care about the ideas, not the final form of the grammar and vocab.

If you write by hand, number each line. If you prefer typing, start typing a numbered list. Either way, it may help to begin by writing sentences #1, 50, and 100 before any others. (The beginning, middle, and end of whatever part you're working on.) Then start from the beginning and start adding sentences. It's a good idea to write every-other-line first, so you can go back and add ideas in between later. That way, on the second pass you can check for what's missing (which in my case is usually setting, gestures, and 5 senses).

Like I said, you can do this for any level of your story. Taking a macro overview will help you generate a long-form synopsis, which can give you a clearer understanding of how to write your story. Take an existing scene that's too short and make it longer. Take a dead end, change something, and let yourself go.

The key thing to remember is that you're not committed to any particular line, phrasing, or word. You may surprise yourself with a really great-sounding line, but that should be secondary to the story. The more helpful thing would be to find new connections and new directions to take.

(OK Jon that's good enough, hopefully somebody will find it helpful.)

-Jon

By the way, the third Nano month, after November and April, is July.

Random High School Memory

When I was a kid I went in the ditch once, in a blizzard. I put the car in the ditch, is what I mean. And not even all the way in, really. Slid off the side of the road, the front right tire went over the edge, the bumper caught on the crust, the car went off balance. Tires were spinning, couldn’t go anywhere, and it was still coming down hard. I turned off the engine and sat there thinking for a minute, and that’s when I saw the big shiny pickup truck coming over the hill. Oh good, I thought. Maybe this guy has a cellular phone. Cell phones were a new thing at the time, most people didn’t have one, but I thought there was a chance. Well, this guy didn’t have a cell phone, but what he did have was a big shiny chain, with some nice big hooks on the ends. Held ‘em up as he climbed out of his cab. I was about sixteen or seventeen, never experienced this kind of thing before. He was probably twenty-three. He had a neon snowmobiling jacket and a piss-colored rat-tail for a haircut. I bet my older brother knew him, not that they would have been friends necessarily. He eyed up the situation, asked if I wanted the help, I said yes. I asked if I could do anything, he said no. He hooked up the chain and had me outta that ditch less than five minutes after I’d seen him coming over the hill off the county highway.

Well, I was sitting there behind the wheel, window rolled down, and he was standing there in the road, in the snow, and I said, “Thanks a lot, mister.” And he said, “Well I bet you could reach down into that little wallet of yours and find a nice twenty for me.”

And I said, “What? You want my money?”

And he said, “I expect I ought to be compensated somehow for pulling you out of that there ditch.”

“Well jeez,” I said, “Haven’t you ever heard of just doing something nice for somebody?”

And you know what he said? He said, “Why I ought to just push your little car right back into that damn ditch. I could do that in about one second.”

And I said, “Go ahead. I’ll just walk home, it’s only ten minutes from here. I’ll just come back with the truck later, like I was going to do in the first place.”

He turned real cross and looked like he was trying to think of something to say, but I guess he lost his nerve because he just got back in his truck and drove away without a word.

I sat there another minute, processing what had just happened, wondering if I had made the wrong decision. I did have about ten bucks on me, I remember. I drove the mile and a half home in weird silence. Told my dad what had happened, and he said that he supposed I should have paid the man. Never could decide what to think about that. I knew something was wrong with this picture, that a person ought to be able to expect that her or his fellow human will help out in time of need, without expectation of reward. But I didn’t know where the problem lay, in the workings of our society. If this guy could afford such a nice big truck, what was a measly ten bucks, or twenty? And if this was the unspoken system of the backroad farm-country folk, that they were all handing each other cash in exchange for simple favors, what did that say about our economy, not to mention our morality?

Emotions

Dear Diary,

Yesterday I had a couple of experiences that really opened up my eyes to what is probably one of my biggest personal flaws: my complete lack of ability when it comes to expressing how I (and my characters) feel.

I'm sure that I do in fact experience a wide range of human emotion, but I use such a limited vocabulary to describe it: happy, sad, annoyed, angry, guilty.

It's just that I don't often reflect deeply on what I'm feeling, nor do I regularly communicate my state of mind to anyone. (My wife might disagree with that last bit.)

This concept has bubbled up in the back of my mind a few times over the last few years, whenever I've considered my approach to writing fiction. In the past I have gone so far as to say that I don't like reading books written in close-third or first-person perspective, because the main character is always blabbing on and on about how they feel. A plot event that in reality takes about half a second to occur will be dragged on for pages and pages as the protagonist experiences their emotions.

So you might say I'm more of a plot person than a people person. At any rate, in my first book, Programmed Cell Death, I made deliberate efforts to avoid describing what the characters are going through on an emotional level, instead preferring to let their words and actions reveal their internal states. Perhaps I was taking the old writers' motto of "Show, Don't Tell" a bit too far.

I used to think that I was obligated to include a bit of emotion in my stories, as that seems to be what most people want to read (but not me). Lately however, (specifically, ever since yesterday morning), I've been reconsidering my stance. I'm realizing that my opposition to the verbal expression of emotion is (quite obviously in retrospect) a result of ingrained societal toxic masculinity, rather than being an aspect of my personal tastes.

As a feminist, I have tried to reflect on and overcome many of my ingrained biases. This is one that I didn't even realize was holding me back, until yesterday.

I was at my five-year-old son's pre-school graduation ceremony. (I know, we violated coronavirus isolation, but that's a whole other post. Basically the gathering was very small, only about eight kids and their parents, the chairs were far apart, everyone was required to take their temperature at the door and wear masks at all times, and the moment it was over, everyone bolted for the exit. But that's not the point.)

The point is this: near the end of the (very short and sweet) ceremony, I could hear a number of people sniffling. I leaned across the distance separating me from my wife, and I whispered, "Sounds like everyone's sick after all." And she said, "No, dummy--they're sad! Their babies are growing up!"

And I said, "Oh... Should I be feeling something more?"

"Well, it wouldn't hurt just to feel more, in general."

And that's when it hit me, and I've been thinking about it ever since.

The second experience happened in the evening, when I was sitting on the couch with Sara, watching the movie Emma. The matchmaker protagonist sets up her friends on a sort of date, and afterwards, the man says something like, "It was marvelous! It felt simply amazing!"

And it hit me again: I don't know how to talk like that. So I've decided to practice.

Today I feel ambitious. I feel a ferocious determination to accomplish my goals. I feel unstoppable. I'm also feeling nervous and wary, because one of my goals for today is to run five kilometers in less than thirty minutes, and this will require me to go outside. I promise I won't get too close to anyone.

Love, Jon

Enter, all who dare!

Welcome to the Clockwork Pines, shelter from rain, my tree fort, my personal headspace. To the left you can see a deteriorating cardboard box full of first-edition Ninja Turtles from my childhood, and on the far wall there's a treasure map I found at a garage sale--the clues point to that old abandoned mansion on the hill behind the schoolhouse. In the corner there's a bookshelf full of ghost stories, and if you stay the night you might find much more to keep your mind occupied...

But first, go here and sign up for my newsletter!