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