Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
           Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,
           Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
           The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
                  —Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

from their earliest identifiable cultures, have lived with the dead.  Inhumation as a solemn rite seems to mark the beginnings of society.  When anthropologists discover graves and corpses arranged ceremonially, with parting gifts, flowers, tokens and special markings, they know they have found the site of a coherent tribe, a group that called itself “We” or “The Human Beings.”

            We bury our dead (how possessive that our!) not to hide them or banish them to the fearful netherworld but out of a sense of solidarity and continuity.  They are our nearest kin—nearer even in shared feeling and experience than our young.  We build homes, cities for the dead, because we understand they need “living room,” that we desire the same planned, discrete space ourselves.  The dead are deeded sacred land so we will not forget them, misplace them.

            Cemeteries pledge immortality as wagers against the implacable powers of time and death.  They recall our finitude (memento mori, et in arcadia ego) and attempt in solid, spatial terms to deny or transcend it.  Our animal natures might be assuaged if we let the dead fall by the way (let the dead bury the dead), bones crumble randomly back to earth.

            Yet we feel compelled to dig and build enduring structures to reinforce our memories and feelings.  Funerals are for the living.  Graveyards are gardens of Adonis, each with a topology, ambience and presence, each as distinct as a village that has grown over generations.  Graveyards are a kind of “middle landscape,” neither wild nor cultivated, neither rural nor urban.  They have suburban/city lawns but they explode with wild flowers, trees, invasive plants.  They are half-worlds, parade grounds for metamorphosis, where souls of the new dead stroll toward a more permanent Elysium.

            In England before the seventeenth century, few people were buried in marked, individuated graves.  Most were simply planted in the parish churchyard’s consecrated earth, which might have one monument for all lying under the turf.  The churchyard itself was the monument to the community of the dead.  Local aristocracy might be interred in vaults inside the church, scrolled with learned inscriptions, but common humanity rested cozily together, as Gray memorialized them, in mass anonymity around the church.

            Churchyards were special places, shaded with trees exotic in the English countryside—dark conifers and yews that spread and formed caverns like openings to Hades’ realm. Yews were planted inside churchyards because they were walled or fenced from open fields or pastures—to keep cattle from grazing on the toxic foliage.  And yews were cultivated for military purposes—their slow-growing wood was tough and tensile, basic material for the English longbow.

            Thus English dead were shaded by a phantom garrison, the archers of Crecy and Agincourt, and the embryonic weapons of future armies whose fletched missiles would contribute to the innumerable ranks of the dead.  Death wields a tortuous logic.

2.

to churchyards.  The English countryside is marked by parish churches the way America’s rural midwest is marked by siloes, tin-bladed patent windmills and lonesome grain elevators.  You see church spires miles away, and they utter stories in their samenesses and differences. Driving in Britain, I find myself scanning the horizon for church towers.

            Spires in Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire are stumpy, squat, shaped like the ornamental pyramids of baroque architecture.  In the south of England, spires are wildly variegated:  round, square, flat-topped, crenellated.  In the west and north they are more often sharp and soaring, real steeples to defy wind and lightning.  In East Anglia, “wool churches” erected as emblems of conspicuous consumption are often cathedral-sized, with huge towers, appended Lady Chapels and vast sheets of glass that make them as airy as orangeries.

            I sought churches because my wife tempted me.  We traveled to see country houses, especially Palladian palaces with landscape gardens by William Kent or Lancelot Brown or Humphrey Repton.  She tempted me first with cathedrals; “It would be silly to be here, so close, and not to visit one or two.”  We found ghost-grey Ely Cathedral towering asymmetrically on its fen “island” and brown Lincoln Cathedral dominating a town from an abrupt hill and York Cathedral’s white presence inside its ring of medieval walls.

            It was easy, as De Quincy might say, to slide from viewing cathedrals to scouting out obscure parish churches to slouching in deserted country churchyards.

            First I went to see what was inside the churches—a rare wineglass pulpit, masterly misericords under the choir seats, a gem of Jacobean organcase carving, bleached wooden angels hovering like hummingbirds among the roofbeams of a Norfolk church.

            Churchyards waited to be perambulated on the way to the vestry door. In each one I paused like Gray’s meditator, surveying this hamlet of the dead.  I read a few scoured stones (rarely ancient—the old ones lined the churchyard wall, moved when the graves were recycled in the nineteenth century).

            This reminded me of Hamlet, when the Prince returns from pirate-fighting and strolls into the Elsinore graveyard in time for Ophelia’s maim’d rites.  Shakespeare describes the technology of burial as he knew it in Warwickshire:  two jolly gravediggers clearing a space for Ophelia, emptying a grave of its occupant (Yorick had only a few years’ quit-rent), whose bones will go to an ossuary or charnel house, heaped in communal anonymity till they are wind-borne dust.  Land is precious, the process of birth, life and death urgent, so the new-dead supplant the long-dead, as the elderly give way to the newborn.

            The propriety is as downright English as thatched cottages and nut-brown ale.  The most famous tableau in English dramatic literature is Hamlet’s meditation on (and to) poor Yorick—a young man philosophically divagating on the inalterable factuality of death, its physical presence and brute undeniability.

            The scene is theatrically powerful not because of the undercurrent of gothic horror but because of its sheer ordinariness. Hamlet is back home, in a country churchyard, where the living and the dead jostle intimately.

3.

to remember:  postcards from the parishes.
            A small Saxon church with a squat piratical tower blackened by extreme age in Melbury Bubb, a village so tiny as to be accessible only by a half-lane dirt track across soft Somerset hills. Giant yews tower around the chapel-sized building. Inside is a baptismal font carved powerfully with sinister dragons or serpents by a Saxon hand, mounted (inexplicably) upside down.  Speculation has it a magical pre-Christian artifact, converted to the new religion by some ancient missionary.  The churchyard is narrow, a dark plot around the tiny building, as if age had shrunk the landscape.

            In Chalfont St. Giles, the churchyard is visible through a narrow passage between village shops. A magnificent lichgate (lich = corpse), a stone and wooden entryway where mourners and pallbearers gathered out of the English drizzle before toting the corpse to the waiting grave. Presumably Laertes and the rest waited off stage under a lichgate while Hamlet communed with Yorick’s chapfallen memories.

            We have reached Chalfont St. Giles to view Milton’s cottage, which is closed.  Closed?  It is like going to Washington and finding the Lincoln Memorial closed. One more indignity heaped on Milton:  blind, a fugitive from justice, disgraced, he sat dictating interminably to his earworm daughter, taking an eternal revenge on posterity by sending forth Paradise Lost to torment generations of schoolchildren.  Today his twee, rose-cover’d cot can only be viewed over its hedge, which I do, snapping a few shots with my new, wholly automated 36 mm. camera.  Voila!  Paradise Captur’d!

            Through the lichgate is a pleasant church and an odd churchyard, with many graves marked with both head- and footstones (as they are also in Lexington, Massachusetts, cemetery, a gunshot from the beginnings of the American Revolution).  Many graves are also surmounted by odd, loaf-shaped capstones like crude sarcophagi.  Weights to hold down the dead?  Artificial hummocks?  No one seems to know, not even a helpful sexton out among the tourists.

            An early Norman church at Stewkley, Buckinghamshire, remarkable for its low, fortresslike profile, its Viking longship air.  But its churchyard is modernized, nondescript—a parking lot and a walk.

            A nonconformist churchyard:  the Quaker meetinghouse at Jordans, a low austere brick building, no idolatrous steeplehouse this.  A few headstones stand in the rolling grounds, reminding me of another Quaker burial ground at Coalbrookdale, with its rows of weathered headstones of the ancient Quaker ironmongers—the Darby family and kin—who started the Industrial Revolution and who went to rest on a grassy Shropshire hillside.

            A climax to our churchyard-hunting:  Stoke Poges, where Gray wrote his “Elegy.”

We arrive on a hot, bright July afternoon.  No dolorous shadows.  It looks as sprightly as a middle-American cemetery spruced up for Decoration Day.  The brick church is undistinguished rural-proletarian, and Gray is memorialized by a low monument and a plaque in one side wall.  But surprisingly, he is further remembered in a clearing at the edge of the churchyard by a ponderous baroque stone stupa, on whose four faces his poem is inscribed.  More surprisingly, a young man lies shirtless, asleep in the sun at the foot of this monument, a weird twenty-first-century echo of the morose youth who dawdles in the churchyard and whose epitaph ends Gray’s verses.

            Other churchyards come to memory:  a small, very early Norman church near Wenlock Edge, black and silver in midsummer moonlight.  The tidy churchyard of St. Oswald’s in Durham City, with the stupendous bulk of Durham Cathedral—the finest Norman building extant—in the background across the River Wear.  A silent, ghostly churchyard in the hamlet of Salle in Norfolk, around an immense, aspiring wool church with strangely pagan carvings on its door arch.  A few miles away in Reepham, a churchyard containing two largish churches—which once contained a third, since three parish boundary lines converged in the little market town.  Or the exotic baroque church—something transported straight from Italy—serving as a parish church for Great Witley in Worcestershire, the church all that remains of a vast estate burnt in the 1930s.  It stands half-attached to spooky ruins of Witley House, once one of the largest country homes and now only a rambling burned-out masonry shell and acres of still-tended landscape gardens.  No churchyard here but the grave of a huge family fortune.

4.

are different.  No gothic medievalism.  No Maxfield Parrish miniaturized pastoral. The wide American land and deep American sky seem indecently to expose our necropolises.

            In the back country are tiny family plots with a score of stones, sometimes old and unweeded, sometimes tidily pruned.  Or isolated churchyards along state or county roads, usually steel-fenced and as neatly geometric as U.S. grid-plan cities. On trips I sometimes pass a military cemetery, with even more pronounced regimentation, a layout like a battle map, with armies of bone-white government-issue crosses at eternal rigid attention.

            Once I lived near an old city cemetery overlooking the Mississippi River, and I often took my young son walking through it.  Its trees were huge, mature spruce and elms (now long gone), and a colony of melanistic squirrels scampered through the branches, like odd, acrobatic cats. On the highest ridge of the cemetery was a large Civil War section:  rows of cast bronze markers for the Union dead, a brace of Napoleon gun-howitzers and a small enclave of Confederate dead.  Here, far up the Mississippi in the chilly north, markers for prisoners who perished at the nefarious Rock Island prison pen. The little cluster of markers looked infinitely forlorn, although they were as neatly tended as the rows of Yankee graves.

            Through the trees my son and I watched the boats and barges on the river.  The ridge was totally still, and it was easy to imagine the rows of long-sunken graves contained listening minds, like the melancholy speakers in the Spoon River Anthology.

Sometimes my son and I stretched out on the slope, as if we had attained the peaceful inertia of the dead—resting, absorbing quietude from the soft grass and pillowed spruce needles.

            As a boy, I often took a shortcut through our municipal cemetery, the shortest route to Clear Creek and the open country.  We retailed graveyard jokes—leading any newcomer, after hyperbolic prolegomena, to see the fabled glass tombstone, which (of course) turned out to be an ordinary granite bloc with the name GLASS deeply incised. Or giggling at a voluptuous semi-nude lady on a pompous mausoleum (I recognize it now as a poor copy of Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave, that icon of sanitized Victorian pulchritude).  Or gaping at strange obelisks and fluted columns on pretentious plots.

            I tread more circumspectly through graveyards today. One close to home reveals in a dark corner stark evidence of a cholera epidemic in the 1850s.  And a sad plentitude of small, semi-anonymous infant markers show that many children died before they were named.  The fragility of life before anesthetics, antibiotics and sanitary plumbing is recalled in stones almost weathered away.

            My father was born over a century ago.  One hundred years still seems to me a number beyond human scale.  Three generations by some reckoning. Time enough for the great mass murders of the twentieth century to fill and refill a million acres of churchyards, were all people buried.

            I remember my son’s innocent delight in the country quiet of the Moline cemetery, his wonder when he spied a black squirrel at its flying trapeze routine in a seventy-foot elm. “Queel!” he would cry, as if he stood in Adam’s garden, naming the animals. I saw small animals in odd funerary clothing, he saw repeated and unique miracles. The exquisite consciousness of life—luckily for us—comes long before we are burdened with the hard knowledge in the Book of Common Prayer’s service for the dead, read in every English churchyard:  “In the midst of life we are in death.” ###