[In the following essay, Sanchez-Eppler links Wordsworth's graveyard poetry and his Essay upon Epitaphs to the movement for burial reform, noting Wordsworth's insistence on recognizing the decay and physical reality of death, in contrast to the reformers' efforts to “sanitize” death literally and emotionally.]

Then did the little Maid reply,
“Seven boys and girls are we;
Two of us in the church-yard lie,
Beneath the church-yard tree.”
“You run about, my little maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.”

—Wordsworth, “We are Seven”

“In our town,” a subscriber wrote to Gentleman's Magazine in 1794, “the venerable remains of the dead ‘hearsed in earth’ have ‘burst their cerements,’ and been exposed to every insult and indignity which the unprotected can experience.”¹ Such calls to protect the bodies of the dead were common throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Essays and letters in popular magazines, pamphlets, and even—by the 1820s—whole books decried the overcrowding of graveyards and advocated more gracious, healthful, and, as one writer put it in 1801, “sweet-smelling” burial places.² Though these protesting voices never coalesced into a formal organization with a coherent program or regular meetings, their scattered texts comprised a persistent and ultimately efficacious force for burial reform. As early as 1721, the Reverend Thomas Lewis argued for the replacement of urban and church burials with the practice of extramural interment in a pamphlet of Seasonable Considerations on the Indecent and Dangerous Custom of BURYING in Churches and Churchyards, … Proving that the Custom is … fatal, in case of INFECTION.³ Lewis' title already signals the dual goals of the British burial reformers: pragmatic concern over the health hazards posed by urban graveyards became entangled with issues of decency. For the anonymous contributor to Gentleman's Magazine the bodies of the dead seem the “unprotected” victims of “insult and indignity,” while to Lewis it is the dead who are threateningly “indecent.” In both cases, however, burial reformers see the promiscuous mingling of the living and the dead as inviting moral as well as physical infection. So George Walker, surgeon, claims that “burial places in the neighborhood of the living are, in my opinion, a national evil—the harbingers, if not the originators of pestilence; the cause direct or indirect of inhumanity, immorality and irreligion.”⁴

The reformers' stance on health and sanitation was variously reinforced by a sympathetic concern for the sentiments of the survivors, a newly voiced need to protect the repose of the dead, and the notion that the graveyard should be a place of moral edification. John Claudius Loudon, who designed Abney Park Cemetery to be both burying ground and public garden, understood the implications of his work: “a secondary object” of all burial places, he notes, “is, or ought to be, the improvement of the moral sentiments and general taste of all classes.”⁵ Advocates of such changes recognized that the relocation and renovation of England's cemeteries might serve as mechanisms for moral and aesthetic reform. The mere act of “Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead … on the Spot where their Remains have been Interred,” William Godwin argued in 1809, would have “moral uses … of no common magnitude.”⁶ While their work was itself an evident result of changing ideologies, the burial reformers of the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries self-consciously advocated a new moral temper.

With the publication of the first Essay upon Epitaphs in February of 1810, William Wordsworth contributed his voice to the debate over burial reform.⁷ Years later this essay was explicitly enrolled in the reform movement when Joseph Snow, with Wordsworth's permission, used it as an introduction to a collection of Snow's epitaphs, a collection he hoped would “commence a good work—the reformation of Protestant Churchyards.”⁸ The primary focus of Wordsworth's three Essays upon Epitaphs, however, is the critical evaluation of epitaphs, and so the Essays appear to offer less of a commentary on burial practices than on poetic ones. Indeed they have most frequently, and fruitfully, been read as a Wordsworthian poetics, the metaphor of the epitaph coming to serve modern critics as an overarching figure for Wordsworth's poems.⁹ It is an appropriate figure, for Wordsworth defines his poetic project against a pervasive awareness of death, so that throughout his writings the grave appears as the source of language, a birthing place for poetry. The function of the grave within Wordsworth's poetics suggests that he had a considerable stake in the issues of burial reform—and provides my motive for relocating his work within that historical context. The burial reformers sought to tame and contain death and in so doing posed a threat to the grounds of Wordsworth's poetics. Situating Wordsworth's Essays in relation to the ongoing discussion of burial practices identifies his work as a critique of both burial reform and, more importantly, the nascent complex of beliefs that underlies it. This essay will examine the ways Wordsworth's critique works both to counter the reformers' attitudes toward death and to propose alternate conceptions of the relations between the dead and the living, burial and commemoration, loss and language.

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Wordsworth's most straightforward critique of the ethos of burial reform can be found not in the Essays themselves but in the disapproval of “Ornamental Gardening” and “alien improver[s]” that suffuses the descriptions of the Lake District he published during the same year that the Essays upon Epitaphs were written.¹⁰ While not specifically critical of graveyard improvements, Wordsworth's general comments on the disfigurement of the countryside are as relevant for those who would regularize churchyards as for those who would garden hillsides or build embankments along Lake Windemere's shore.¹¹ Indeed, his explanation and critique of the desire to improve, and therefore deface, the countryside proves particularly pointed if read with the work of the burial reformers in mind, for in these efforts to reorder the landscape Wordsworth detects an attempt to negate the presence of death.

All gross transgressions of this kind originate, doubtless, in a feeling natural and honourable to the human mind, viz. the pleasure which it receives from distinct ideas, and from the perception of order, regularity, and contrivance. Now, unpractised minds receive these impressions only from objects that are divided from each other by strong lines of demarcation; hence the delight with which such minds are smitten by formality and harsh contrast. But I would beg of those who are eager to create the means of such gratification, first carefully to study what already exists; and they will find, in a country so lavishly gifted by nature, an abundant variety of forms marked out with a precision that will satisfy their desires. Moreover, a new habit of pleasure will be formed opposite to this, arising out of the perception of the fine gradations by which in nature one thing passes away into another, and the boundaries that constitute individuality disappear in one instance only to be revived elsewhere under a more alluring form.

(Guide, II, 210)

A natural order in which a thing “passes away” “only to be revived” defies all wished-for boundaries between the living and the dead. In criticizing these improvers Wordsworth insists on the fluidity of the very dividing line that the burial reformers wished to install when they made even graveyards places of “order, regularity, and contrivance.”

The permeability of the boundary between the living and the dead is reiterated within Wordsworth's verse, frequently marking the place where poetry begins. The assumptions of burial reform provide a foil against which Wordsworth defines that place. Thus the argument between the little girl, who admits no distinction between her dead siblings and her living ones, and her interrogator, who insists on strong lines of demarcation, makes it plausible to read “We are Seven” as Wordsworth's own staging of the debate over burial practices.¹² Such a reading inverts current critical interpretations of the poem. Though Geoffrey H. Hartman, for example, stresses the proximity of birth and death, and recognizes that the child's resistance to the concept of death-as-separation is a sign of her closeness to nature, he nevertheless characterizes the poem as “a dialogue between the rational questioner and the obtuse little girl.”¹³ The questioner, however, is as stubborn as the child, as virulently insistent that “ye are only five” as she is willfully sure that “we are seven.” There is a gratuitous and growing violence in his argument, until by the final stanza his claim that “They are dead; those two are dead!” takes on a decidedly malevolent edge.¹⁴ His inability to admit that death and life are linked is as complete as her inability to acknowledge that they are radically separate. Like the advocates for more orderly graveyards, the questioner understands death not as part of a natural cycle in which what passes away is revived and the shifting of states conserves presence, but rather as a static arithmetical operation in which an ominous subtraction sign serves as boundary line: 7 - 2 = 5. The child, however, refuses to cordon off the dead from the living:

“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little Maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother's door,
And they are side by side.
My stockings there I often knit,
My 'kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit—
I sit and sing to them.”

Her daily life is more closely intertwined with her dead brother and sister than with the two at Conway or the two at sea. The gradations of absence and presence are exceedingly fine, since for her presence is more a function of locality than of vitality, and the locality of the dead is “twelve steps” from “mother's door,” in close proximity to the locus of birth. Her cheerful intimacy with her dead playmates suggests that the grave marks not loss but presence: it is the fertile “ground” of song.

Wordsworth praises churchyards for fostering “the community of the living and the dead” (Essay I, II, 56). The intercourse that the reformers feared and called perverse he sees as generative, as giving birth to language. The tombstone, Wordsworth explains at the beginning of his first Essay upon Epitaphs, stands at the origin of writing—the first inscription, the primal poem.

It need scarcely be said, that an Epitaph presupposes a Monument, upon which it is to be engraven. Almost all Nations have wished that certain external signs should point out the places where their dead are interred. Among savage tribes unacquainted with letters this has mostly been done either by rude stones placed near the graves, or by mounds of earth raised over them.

(Essay I, II, 49)

The “rude stones” and “mounds of earth” signify without recourse to letters, in a language that carries meaning across national and cultural as well as linguistic boundaries. Yet, though the gravestone is presented as the parent of poetry, it too is secondary, merely a marker gesturing towards the dead body decaying beneath it. The epitaph “presupposes a monument” and the monument presupposes a body. Wordsworth's Essays are continually repeating this movement from the inscribed word to the unlettered “external sign” of the monument and finally to the corpse. His poetry of epitaphs, like his Essays upon Epitaphs, is but the next in that series of “stones placed near” and “earth raised over” the bodies of the dead. Thus for Wordsworth, the decomposing corpse that prompts monuments and the inscriptions upon them lies at the source of writing, a source his words both cover and wish to approach.

The custom of marking the site of interment derives, according to Wordsworth, “from a twofold desire” to arrest “violation” and to facilitate “memory” (Essay I, II, 49). The monument thus simultaneously aids and hinders access to the dead. The desires that Wordsworth posits as the source of gravestones are as ambivalent as the feelings betrayed in his Essays upon them. The dead and the origin of poetic language (equated in Wordsworth's Essays) must be both kept underground and recalled, or recalled in order to be kept underground. To cast the epitaph as a metaphor for Wordsworth's poetic task consequently entails recognizing the double motions of repression and commemoration at the center of Wordsworthian poetics. The poetry of epitaphs acknowledges its dependence upon the bodies of the dead, and its need to pillage the grave in order to be written. The locus of the grave, combining the decomposing corpse and memorial tombstone, provides within itself both organic and inorganic, ephemeral and permanent, conceptions of the self and the poetic endeavor.

By acknowledging the conflictive relation between remembering and repressing, Wordsworth inverts the conception of death implicit in the projects of burial reform. For unlike Wordsworth, whose poetics depends upon these contradictions, the burial reformers blithely assimilated their efforts to prevent violations of the grave with their desire to enable commemoration of the deceased. Faced with the raids of “body-snatchers” and the spades of careless sextons, the reformers struggled to keep the dead under ground.¹⁵ Stories of exposed corpses abound, ranging from the humorous, “I remember in passing through a churchyard, I unintentionally broke five ribs and kicked an os sacrum several paces before me,”¹⁶ to the sentimental and gruesome, “at another place, amongst a heap of rubbish, a young woman recognized the finger of her mother, who had been buried there a short time previous.”¹⁷ The desire to design cemeteries that would be spacious and orderly enough to keep bodies buried was symptomatic of a need to hide the organic realities of decomposition. Thus one of the primary results of the burial reform debate was to divorce the image of death from organicism and decay. The creation of cemeteries capable of protecting the body from violation was a necessary condition of the growing tendency to think of death less as a physical and natural fact than as a sanctified and sentimentalized ideal: death beautified.¹⁸ Praising graveyards “planted round with the dark, gloomy yew, so that it might convey those awful ideas so congenial to the spot,” the advocates for “Rural Cemeteries” were ultimately less concerned with creating a suitable site for burying the dead, than with designing the ideal place for the memories and the meditations of the living.¹⁹ The graveyard became a privileged site for musings, so that in Lady's Magazine, for example, a series of moral and poetical meditations, in a highly romantic style, was quite conventionally entitled “Solitary Walks in a Country Churchyard.” An August walk of 1807 ironically shared the issue with one of the Lucy poems in which Wordsworth, instead of claiming any memorial permanence for the dead, places disintegration and anonymity at the center of the commemorative act.²⁰

It is not possible to mourn, the reformers argued, in a graveyard scattered with bones. Memories of the dead were therefore seen as dependent on the virtual effacement of the facts of death. Repression and remembrance are reconciled by making the second actually dependent upon the first. In defending his project of commemorating the graves of the “Illustrious Dead,” William Godwin begins by acknowledging the “trite and obvious objection” that “to the dead man (as a dead man) it is indeed a matter of indifference what becomes of his body.”²¹ The impossibility of ever succeeding in completely getting rid of the dead body makes Godwin's argument almost a parody of itself. The trouble with such “a matter of indifference” is indeed the recalcitrant “matter” of the “dead man (as a dead man),” that body that stubbornly persists in being “his.” Dismissing this indismissible corpse, Godwin goes on to describe in pious and emotional terms the sentimental significance of proper burial—for the survivors. The desire to mark graves is presented as bearing no relation to the physical remains actually interred there; what Godwin calls the “heap of mould” is irrelevant; the value of the spot derives solely from the survivor's penchant for “attribut[ing] a certain sacredness to the grave of one he loved.”²² Philippe Ariès' survey of European tombstones demonstrates how historically conditioned is this conception of the grave and its marker. Only with the tombstones of the eighteenth century does Ariès discern “a rising need to proclaim one's grief, to advertise it on the tomb, which now becomes something it was not, the privileged place of memory and regret.”²³

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The perception of the burial ground as an apt spot for mourning and meditation governed not only the discussion of the appropriate appearance of the graveyard, its location and upkeep, but also the debate over the proper tone and content of the words engraved upon the monuments enclosed there. For the burial reformers the presence of the dead had increasingly come to depend not on the proximity of their interred flesh, but rather on the legibility of their textual proxy: the epitaph. Thus for the burial reformers, as for Wordsworth, the debate over burial practices encompassed a debate over linguistic practices. In contrast to Wordsworth's notion of the interrelation of language and death, the reformers used words to take the place of the dead, and so ultimately to deny death's presence. William Pulleyn's book of epitaphs, for example, proffers this symptomatic definition of the word “tombstone”: “the compound word Tombstone, which signifies a tablet, on which is inscribed the virtues or peculiarities of the deceased, is derived from toma, a volume, and lapis a stone.”²⁴ The fact that “tomb” does not stem from toma only emphasizes Pulleyn's belief that it should. He has no excuse, as both John Ash's New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775) and Baily's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1794) assert that tomb derives from tumbos or tumba, a burial mound, related to organic lumps of tuber but not to tomes. In Pulleyn's etymology the word that acknowledges the fact of interment is converted into a word that insists on the literary nature of the grave.

Pulleyn's notion of language as displacing the corpse proposes a very different relation between death and language than that suggested by Wordsworth. In the Essays upon Epitaphs, as in “We are Seven,” the grave enables poetry because it provides a space in which decay and preservation, absence and presence, are simultaneously available. Where the reformers see language as rectifying loss, as simply commemorative, Wordsworth sees it as residing in the fluid boundary between the organic and the inorganic, the corpse and its marker. His ballad “The Thorn” exemplifies the ramifications of this doubleness.²⁵ Described as “like a stone,” the thornbush is a living marker, and therefore perfectly combines the organic and memorial functions of the grave. Wordsworth's note claims that the observation of a thornbush—made “impressive” by a storm—prompted his ballad, so that in both the writing and reading of this ballad the bush produces the stormy tale of infanticide.²⁶ Here again the bush-as-grave serves as the source of song. Mound and thornbush, however, are never proven to be a child's grave: “I cannot tell; I wish I could.” Instead, their function as grave remains explicitly linguistic, the creation of the narrator's insistently repeated simile: they are “like an infant's grave.” Thus Wordsworth presents death and language as mutually constitutive, each the origin of the other.

The opposition between Wordsworth's and Pulleyn's readings of the grave clarifies Wordsworth's stake in refuting the ideals of epitaphic writing endorsed by burial reform. Once every churchyard began to be viewed as “a book of instruction, and every grave-stone a leaf of edification,” the words there inscribed began to attract improvers and critics.²⁷ Among the burial reformers, for example, the Reverend William Morgan published Collectaneous Epitaphs; Chiefly Designed to Assist Surviving Relations in Fixing upon Suitable Inscriptions for the Tombs and Gravestones of Deceased Friends (1823), in the hope that such a collection would help mourners and their clergy to improve these essential memorial texts—or rather, would grant an emotional and moral content to replace the physical contents of the grave. Wordsworth's Essays upon Epitaphs clearly share in many of these critics' concerns, for he too is a reader and judge of epitaphs, distinguishing what “may impress and affect” from what “is unaffecting and profitless” (Essay I, II, 58, 59). Yet, while the Essays seem to concur with the reformers' conception of the epitaph as a memorial to affectation and an expression of grief, Wordsworth defines this function more stringently and in somewhat different terms than those employed by his contemporaries.

The incompatibility of Wordsworth's attitude toward epitaphs with the attitudes of graveyard reformers can best be illustrated by the incongruous results of their attempts to appropriate his Essay for their own projects. Joseph Snow simply republished Wordsworth's first Essay as an introduction to and implicit endorsement of his own epitaphic verses, promising that these Lyra Memorialis would not be “profitless.”²⁸ Augustus Hare followed Snow in quoting Wordsworth's Essay in the preface to a similar collection of model epitaphs, specifically designed for country churchyards.²⁹ Hare borrows Wordsworth's phrases to emphasize and explain the edifying import of graveyard tomes: “an epitaph is not a proud writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all … it is concerning all, and for all,” (Essay I, II, 59). He stops, however, at the end of the paragraph, disregarding the injunction that follows: “the writer who would excite sympathy is bound in this case, more than in any other, to give proof that he himself has been moved.” The epitaphs proffered by Morgan, Snow, Hare, and many others necessarily fail to meet these criteria, for, however seemly its teaching, the ready-made epitaph marks only the form, not the feeling, of commemoration, allowing affection to stand in the place of affection:

no faults have such a killing power as those which prove that he is not in earnest, that he is acting a part, has leisure for affectation. … And indeed, where the internal evidence proves that the Writer was moved, in other words, where this charm of sincerity lurks in the language of a Tombstone and secretly pervades it, there are no errors in style or manner for which it will not be, in some degree, a recompence.

(Essay II, II, 70)

The goals of decorum and edification, if utilized to supplant true emotion, lend their strength to the “killing power” of affected verse. The victim is sympathy, and therefore the act of commemoration itself. Grief and commemoration, it is worth noting, are described as lurking and secret, as in need of exposure: here too Wordsworth perceives himself as violating that which is buried.

In insisting on earnest emotion, in validating only the utterance of the “sincere mourner” (Essay II, II, 66), Wordsworth takes literally the period's characterization of the gravestone as a symbol of grief and love. By pressing these pieties to their logical extreme, however, he reveals the contradictions inherent in the work of reformers like Morgan and Hare. For while privileging the grave's commemorative function led Wordsworth to declare emotional truth essential for poetic truth, it spurred many of his contemporaries to develop means of confining and standardizing the feelings of the bereaved, of molding them to religious or societal conceptions of what grief ought to look like. The efforts to improve epitaphs, like the movement to create more congenial burying grounds, achieved the image of a beautiful death by repressing not only death and grief, but even the efforts to repress them, so that nothing is felt to lurk, and nothing threatens to return. The desire to hide the facts of physical decay beneath a pleasant garden was matched by the wish to cover grief with more decorous words. The work of the epitaph writers and burial reformers can be understood as an attempt to tame death, to reduce it to socially amenable dimensions.

Wordsworth's practice in the Essays is directly opposed to these tendencies; he strips away the words in search of “proof” that the writer has indeed “been moved.”

An experienced and well-regulated mind will not, therefore, be insensible to this monotonous language of sorrow and affectionate admiration; but will find under that veil a substance of individual truth. Yet, upon all Men, and upon such a mind in particular, an Epitaph must strike with a gleam of pleasure, when the expression is of that kind which carries conviction to the heart at once that the Author was a sincere mourner, and that the Inhabitant of the Grave deserved to be so lamented.

(Essay II, II, 66)

Much like his characterization of the grave, Wordsworth's notion of the epitaph connects the motions of memory with those of violation. The reading of an epitaph, at least for the “experienced and well-regulated” reader, involves the lifting of the “veil” of language, the stripping away of all decorous coverings in order to disclose the body of grief that the words both communicate and hide. The reward for this violation is a “gleam of pleasure.” This gleam, conversely, offers proof of the author's sincerity—the reader's pleasure standing as a sign of the writer's grief.

Wordsworth offers his Essays “to assist the reader in separating truth and sincerity from falsehood and affection” (Essay III, II, 82). The Essays are lessons in reading, specifically in the reading of epitaphs, and so they are lessons in the uncovering of grief. Against the desire to tame and contain sorrow, Wordsworth places a method for finding it, for revealing the emotion that “lurks in the language of the tombstone and secretly pervades it.” In these terms the role of the reader is identical to that of the epitaph. Both not only make secret grief evident, but actually recreate it, making past sorrow visible to present eyes. The finest epitaph, for Wordsworth, is thus the stone that most invites such acts of recreation.

In an obscure corner of a Country Church-yard I once espied, half-overgrown with Hemlock and Nettles, a very small Stone laid upon the ground, bearing nothing more than the name of the Deceased with the date of birth and death, importing that it was an Infant which had been born one day and died the following. I know not how far the Reader may be in sympathy with me, but more awful thoughts of rights conferred, of hopes awakened, of remembrances stealing away or vanishing were imparted to my mind by that Inscription there before my eyes than by any other that it has ever been my lot to meet with upon a Tomb-stone.

(Essay III, II, 93)

In the proximity of the dates of birth and death this stone marks not death's otherness but its nearness. Rather than separating the living from the dead this stone, “half” covered, signals their commingling, their union in one whole. The smallness of the stone and the bare factuality of the inscription provide little more than a gap for the reader to fill with imaginative sympathy. Wordsworth's aside to the reader, moreover, casts this description in the form of an exercise, a standard by which to measure “how far” the reader can follow the poet in this act of resurrection.³⁰ The idea of a beautiful death casts the tomb and its epitaph as a means of burying the realities of decomposition and loss. Wordsworth, in his Essays upon Epitaphs, enlists the reader as the agent of a general disinterment. The traditional invitation to “Pause, Traveller” carved upon the tomb becomes under Wordsworth's tutelage a reminder of responsibility, enjoining interpretive action. If language can disguise, these Essays imply, then interpretation must be schooled to reveal. Thus in his lessons on reading epitaphs Wordsworth poses a challenge to the contemporary attitude toward death. In these terms, Wordsworth's evocation of a language capable of being “an incarnation of thought” (Essay III, II, 84) rejects the use of words to “clothe,” contain, and therefore control feeling, proposing in its place a new poetics that would grant being instead of burial to the facts of death and loss.

The assertion that language as incarnation provides the ideal medium for a poetry of epitaphs is not a conviction free of contradictions. The disintegration of the bodies of the dead seems to stand in constant and mocking opposition to Wordsworth's claims for the possibility of linguistic incarnation.³¹ Unlike the burial reformers, who work to hide these contradictions, Wordsworth embraces them, insisting on the fluidity of the boundary between life and death, and on the unveiling of grave and grief as the test of poetic value. Yet in speaking of language as an “incarnation of thought” Wordsworth has used “thought” to replace the dead body as the object in need of flesh. The metaphorical substitution implicates Wordsworth himself in the process of disregarding the corpse in order to take comfort in meditation. While his use of metaphor to deflect attention from the corpse indicates Wordsworth's complicity in those strategies of repression and concealment that he finds most reprehensible in the burial reformers' treatment of death, this very duplicity demonstrates the close connections between the problems of burial and those of language. Wordsworth characterizes the “ill gift” of misused language as “a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve” (Essay III, II, 84, 85). Language itself suffers the same contradictions as the grave. Just as the fact of burial yokes the decomposing corpse to an act of memorialization, language yokes the dissolution of meaning to the effort to preserve it by giving it form. Thus the preservation of memory and the decomposition of the corpse match language's double capacity to “incarnate” and to “dissolve.” In choosing the epitaph as the origin and perfect exemplum of poetic language, Wordsworth calls attention to this pairing, insisting that decomposing lurks beneath and within every memorial word.

Notes

1. Anonymous “Letter to the Editor,” Gentleman's Magazine, 64 (1794), 1083-84.

2. M. N., Gentleman's Magazine, 71 (1801), 1178. This letter was written as a response to a previous Gentleman's Magazine article describing the church at Abergavenny and entitled “The Pursuits of Architectural Innovation” (December 1801). The article's passing mention of “unhallowed mortuaries” in which human bones remain “open to any eye” prompts M. N. to urge a general reform of burial practices. That M. N.'s appeal originates in so unlikely a place as an article concerned with church architecture proves quite characteristic of the haphazard nature of the debate over burial reform.

3. Cited by James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Newton Abott: David and Charles, 1972), p. 39.

4. George Alfred Walker, surgeon, Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly those of London, with a Concise History of the Modes of Interment among Different Nations from the Earliest Periods, and a Detail of Dangerous and Fatal Results Produced by the Unwise and Revolting Custom of Inhuming the Dead in the Midst of the Living (London: 1838), p. 3.

5. On the laying out, planting, and managing of Cemeteries, and on the improvement of Churchyards … (London: 1843), p. 13. Opened in 1840 on the outskirts of London, Abney Park Cemetery marked the burial reform movement's success.

6. William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres: or, A Proposal for Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead of All Ages on the Spot where their Remains have been Interred (London: 1809), p. 91.

7. The first Essay was printed in Coleridge's The Friend, 22 February 1810. The second and third Essays were also written at this time with the expectation that they would appear in a future number. They never did, despite correspondence indicating that Coleridge wished to include them in The Friend of 1812; indeed they were not published until the 1876 edition of Wordsworth's Prose Works.

8. Joseph Snow, Lyra Memorialis: Original Epitaphs and Churchyard Thoughts in Verse … with an essay by William Wordsworth, new edition remodelled and enlarged (London: 1847).

9. See, for example, Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, “Wordsworth: The Monumental Poet,” Philological Quarterly, 44 (1965), 503-18; Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry,” From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965); and D. D. Devlin, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Epitaphs (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981).

10. Wordsworth's text accompanied Joseph Wilkinson's etchings in Select Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland and Lancashire (London: 1810). See A Guide through the District of the Lakes in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), II, 207, 208. All citations of Wordsworth's prose writings are from this edition and are noted parenthetically within the text.

11. Churchyards feature among the sights described in Wordsworth's tours; frequent stopping places on the family's walks, they were very much a part of Wordsworth's landscape. For example, the churchyard of Ulpha Kirk, described along with that of the Seathwaite Chapel in An Unpublished Tour (Guide, II, 299-301) is also mentioned as the site of a picnic in Wordsworth's letter to Sara Hutchinson of September 1811: “We dined in the Porch of Ulpha Kirk, and passed two Hours there and in the beautiful churchyard. Our pace was so slow and our halts so many and long that it was half past 4 in the afternoon before we reached New Field (the public House in Seathwaite) though we had left Duddon Bridge at nine” (The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, 6 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969], II, 509-10). Sara Hutchinson's journal of her tour of Scotland with the Wordsworths similarly records visits to Highland churchyards.

12. The poem's relation to efforts to ornament nature is emphasized by the commentary which Wordsworth dictated to Isabella Fenwick. He concludes his discussion of the poem with the story of a later journey to Goodrich Castle during which he could not find traces of his child interlocutor (“as, unfortunately, I did not even know her name”), but did find signs of building and improving (“I could have almost wished for power, so much the contrast vexed me, to blow away Sir——— Meyrick's impertinent structure and all the fopperies it contains”). Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 1798, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 137. Lines from “We are Seven” refer to this edition, pp. 63-65.

13. Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), p. 144.

14. The questioner's desire to force the child to acknowledge the annihilation implicit in death allies him to the advocates of burial reform. One collector of epitaphs, who shared in the reformers' conception of graveyards as morally edifying ground, offered their spiritual lessons to “juvenile readers” in the form of a collection of epitaphs taken from children's graves and published as part of the “Juvenile Book-Store” series. In the preface he explains that these graveyard messages would make his young readers aware of that state towards which “we are all hastening as fast as the wings of time will carry us.” On the title page is set this verse: “I in the burying place may see / Graves shorter far than I; / From Death's arrest no age is free, / Young Children too may die” (Epitaphs and Elegies [New York: 1816]).

15. Among the successes of the burial reform movement was the Anatomy Act of 1832, which effectively put an end to “body-snatching.” The practice no doubt figured more prominently in the imaginations and Gothic novels of the period than in any real graveyards. Nevertheless evidence of actual corpse thefts does exist: “Of some seventy coffins dating from the last half of the eighteenth century disinterred from a city churchyard recently in connexion with road-widening, for reburial elsewhere, eight were found to be filled with stones” (Sir Arnold Wilson, M.P., and Hermann Levy, Burial Reform and Funeral Costs [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938], p. 16, n. 3).

16. Thomas Cogan, The Rhine: or a Journey from Utretch [sic] to Francfort … (London: 1794); quoted in a burial reform letter to Gentleman's Magazine, 64 (1794), 1083.

17. Walker, Gatherings from Graveyards, p. 202. The prevalence of such passages in burial reform tracts suggests the ambivalent relation between these reforms and the period's craze for Gothic narratives. The reformers desire to banish Gothic terrors, yet their own fascination with graveyards, the hyperbolic tone of their writings, and their gleeful descriptions of horrific details indicate the prurient, sensationalist, and hence Gothic nature of their anti-Gothic stance. John Snart exemplifies this double agenda as he explains his goals in writing a reformist book on premature burial: “The object of the writer is not to create a false alarm or excite groundless fears, to lessen the pittance of human happiness by vague terrors, or to harrow up the passions of the soul by romantic vapours, arising from a melancholy cast of thought in himself, the inflations of a turbulent spirit or the illusions of a distracted brain! but to call forth the rational faculties alone to exert the proper functions, and avert the impending evils and immensity of woe that the present system of interment menaces the world with.” While rejecting the romantic false alarm, Snart is able to make graveyards into monsters. See Thesaurus of Horror; or the Charnel-House Explored!! … (London: 1817), pp. 26-27.

18. In a journal entry from the year 1825 Coraly de Gaix wrote, “we live in an age of beautiful deaths.” Quoted by Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981), p. 409.

19. M. N., Gentleman's Magazine, p. 1177.

20. John Webb, “Solitary Walks in a Country Churchyard” appeared in Lady's Magazine, May-November 1807. “I travelled among unknown men” appeared in the issue for August 1807.

21. Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres, pp. 2-4.

22. Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres, pp. 16, 18.

23. Ariès, Hour of Our Death, pp. 529-30.

24. William Pulleyn, Church-yard Gleanings … (London: 1830), p. 262.

25. Lyrical Ballads, ed. Owen, pp. 67-76.

26. The poem “arose out of my observing, on the ridge of Quantock Hill, on a stormy day a thorn which I had often passed in calm and bright weather without noticing it. I said to myself, ‘Cannot I by some invention do as much to make this Thorn an impressive object as the storm has made it to my eyes at this moment.’ I began the poem accordingly and composed it with great rapidity” (Lyrical Ballads, ed. Owen, pp. 138-39).

27. Leigh Richmond, Yong Cottager; these words are employed as an epigraph, and are twice repeated within the prefatory essay to Benjamin Richings, A General Volume of Epitaphs, Original and Selected (London: 1840).

28. Eminently practical, the first edition of Joseph Snow's volume included both designs for headstones and “some suitable verses for epitaphs.” Light in Darkness, or Sermons in Stones … (London: 1845).

29. Augustus J. C. Hare, Epitaphs for Country Churchyards (Oxford: 1856).

30. D. D. Devlin makes the related argument that the Essays “suggest that the force of an epitaph (the poetry of an epitaph) is not in the words but in what the reader brings to the words … a theory of poetry which requires the co-operation of writer and reader” (Wordsworth and the Poetry of Epitaphs, p. 31).

31. Frances Ferguson makes the same observation: “to insist upon language as incarnation in essays devoted to epitaphs is a strange tack, because the incarnation of language comes into direct opposition with the factual deaths, the de-incarnation of the actual human beings who are memorialized in the epitaphs” (Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977], p. 31).