A choice collection of brief trifles, including inscribed tombstones and other railleries complied by IRA MAINE, Poetry Editor
Let’s begin, at least in a geographical sense, in Scotland;
Here lie the bones of poor wee Charlotte,
Born a virgin, died a harlot.
She was aye a virgin at seventeen,
A remarkable thing in Aberdeen.
Now, on the off chance that you might suspect that a page or two of coarse scurrility is in the offing, let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.
This from the man who watched the tumbrils pass his window on the way to Tyburn;
When Sir Joshua Reynolds died
All Nature was degraded;
The King dropped a tear
Into the Queen’s ear
And all his pictures faded.
This is William Blake (‘…and was Jerusalem builded here…) poet, painter and ardent reformer, dipping his lid to the finest portrait painter of his time.
At approximately the same time, in the last decade of the 18th Century, Richard Court, an obscure blacksmith died, having survived a lifetime of heat and hammering. He is remembered thus;
My Sledge and Hammer lie reclin’d.
My Bellows too have lost their Wind;
My Fire is out, and Forge Decay’d,
And in the Dust my Vice is Laid.
A good play on the word ‘Vice’ and a good joke to end the verse on.
For those with an interest in how words change, not only in their meaning but in how their sound changes, look how in the 18th Century, ‘wind’ rhymed with ‘reclin;d’. It seems likely that at that time ‘wind’ rhymed with ‘chimed’ or ‘wined’ rather than the other way round. Despite all this, you can still ‘wind’ a clock, should you get ‘wind’ of one through the ‘window’ on a ‘winding’ and ‘windy’ stairs, but take care; I might just be winding you up…
The only information to hand concerning the next gravestone inscription is that the stone sits in ‘Sutton Parish Graveyard’, somewhere in England. There is a ‘Sutton’ in Surrey, near London, but I hardly think a stone as splendid as this would have survived the depredations of suburban ‘respectability’.
The epitaph gloriously suggests that the husband was perhaps somewhat less than devastated when his wife finally handed in her dinner pail.
Here lies my poor wife,
Without bed or blankit,
But dead as a door-nail,
God be thankit.
In the same vein, and again towards the end of the 18th Century, there was Arabella Young, a shrew of some considerable reputation, if the taut and almost teeth-gritted inscription on her gravestone is any indicator;
Beneath this stone
A lump of clay
Lies Arabella Young
Who, on the 21st of May
1771
Began…to…hold…her…tongue.
Now in this valedictory funerogeny, lest I be accused of misogeny, I’ll take up my pen on the condition of men, and blind you with utter Codswogeny!
Politicians nowadays regularly break election promises. It was ever thus. David Lloyd George, a Welshman, was Prime Minister of England in the years after the Great War. (1914-1918) This anonymous (and premature) epitaph, penned for the Welshman, could as easily be hung round the necks of Clinton, Blair, Fraser or John Howard.
Lloyd George.
Count not his broken pledges as a crime;
He MEANT them, HOW he meant them—at the time.
And now, for a flourish, a bit of a dash, to finish this ‘ere with a bit of a smash, I’ll offer you something that’s (not quite) sublime, but most of the lines and the rhythms should rhyme. It’s mostly composed of flotsam and jetsam but this one will end with the Doc. Isaac Letsome;
When’s people’s ill they comes to I,
I physics, bleeds and sweats ‘em,
Sometimes they live, sometimes they die;
What’s that to I? I Letsome.
I know, oh, I KNOW, that which has passed was the perfect opportunity to sign off but that would not allow me room to include four lines of premature epitaph by a hero of mine, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. He is, of course, in this four line verse, referring to the English king, Charles the Second.
Here lies our mutton-eating King
Whose word no man relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.
Charles, largely because he was the King, inevitably had the last word. His reply to Rochester’s insultingly bitchy observation is a good-humoured, clever and witty response;
‘My sayings are my own, my actions are my Ministers’!’
Ka-boom.