The Charnel House

Writing about Archbishop's Luwum's death in 'The Martyr' led me to ponder on death more generally and to this sonnet. It has a tangential relevance in 2012. There is public worry that we are running out of burial grounds! Perhaps as a result of the Victorian cult of the dead the idea has grown that a grave is forever, whereas in previous centuries it was very much a temporary thing. Most people would have been buried, shrouded rather than coffined, in a shallow grave; after a few years, when the flesh had decayed, the bones would be taken up, placed in a charnel house and the grave reused. Very sensible.

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A charnel house is like a place of smiles,
Replete with ribs sequestered from their clay;
Relieved of motives they subsist in piles
As tidy as the dust or yesterday.

The ladies come in carriages to weep,

And schoolboys taught to venerate the dead;
But silent are the bones upon their heap,
Indifferent to a kiss or lowered head.

Death is no more than evening in the sky,

A flock of starlings in the winter trees.
We go our different journeys, take our ease,
Are ambushed in the twinkling of an eye:
And when the scuffled business has been done
The bones remain, impressive as the sun.

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© January 1980