XXIX
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

Dear Verena, I am finding, to my horror, that the poets when at their briefest are usually concerned with mortality: and not necessarily because the space on a tombstone is restricted and they are writing for the stone-cutter, although that may have been an influence, but from choice. Yet as it is my belief that we ought to familiarize ourselves with the idea of death (and indeed the War forced us overmuch to do so) you mustn’t mind an epitaph or two now and then, particularly when they are beautiful. Or shall we get them all over at once—and illustrate my discovery too? The most famous of all, the epitaph on the Countess Dowager of Pembroke, every one knows:—

Underneath this sable Hearse
Lies the subject of all verse:
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother:
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Fair, and Learn’d, and Good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.

But I like hardly less the elegy on Elizabeth L. H. It is longer—longer indeed than the eight-line limit that we have set ourselves—but I have cut off the end, which is inferior:—

Wouldst thou hear what Man can say
In a little? Reader, stay.
Underneath this stone doth lie
As much Beauty as could die:
Which in life did harbour give
To more Virtue than doth live.
If at all she had a fault,
Leave it buried in this vault.

Then there is Herrick’s “Upon a Child that Died”—another inspiration:—

Here she lies, a pretty bud,
Lately made of flesh and blood:
Who as soon fell fast asleep
As her little eyes did peep.
Give her strewings but not stir
The earth that lightly covers her.

With these, which are Tudor or early Stuart, I would associate the Scotch epitaph on Miss Lewars:—

Say, sages, what’s the charm on earth
Can turn Death’s dart aside?
It is not purity and worth,
Else Jessie had not died.

And Stevenson’s best known poem is an epitaph too:—

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

But enough of mortality! Let me tell you a little thing that happened yesterday. An Italian I used to know, a clerk, who has been in England for three or four years, came in to say goodbye. He is going home.

“You’ll be glad to be seeing your wife again after all this long while,” I said.

He pondered. “My wife, I don’t know,” he replied at last: “but my leetler boy, Oh, yais!”—Good night, my dear.

R. H.