An island race must come to terms with the sea. The lives of its mariners are often forfeit to the vagaries of the mutinous waves. The inscriptions on their gravestones often pay homage to the overwhelming power of nature. Historically, the coast of Ulster is littered with shipwrecks; lyrically, the headstones of the drowned reveal a litany of verses drenched in fear and loathing for the ocean’s wrath.

God’s dominion over the sea tempers this abject terror; allusions are made to Christ’s calming of the storm when adrift with the terrified apostles, and to his taming of the tidal ferocity by walking on the water.

From Boreas blasts and neptune’s waves
Which toss’d us to and fro,
Escap’d from both by God’s decree,
We harbour here below,
Altho we do at anchor lie,
With many of our fleet,
One day we must set sail again
Our Saviour Christ to meet
Richard McDowell, mariner of Bangor, Bangor Abbey, County Down

His voice commands the tempest forth,
And stills the stormy wave:
And though his arm be strong to smite
T'is also strong to save
Erected by Captain Findlyson Kenn in memory of Charles Kenn his brother who perished at sea, with all his crew, by the foundering of his vessel in March 1835, Bangor Abbey, County Down

It is estimated that half of the sailors who manned the Royal Navy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were Irish. Their contribution to the British victories at Trafalgar, Copenhagen and the Nile was significant. The death of one such tar is commemorated in the cemetery of Bangor Abbey:

Born to a course of manly Action free,
He dauntless trod ye fluctuating sea,
In [p]ompous war, or happier peace to bring
Joy to my Sire, and honour to my King;
And much by favour to the God was done;
Ere half the term of human life was run
One fatal night returning from the bay,
Whence British fl[eets] ye Gallic lands survey,
Whilst with war[m ho]pe my trembling heart beat high,
My friends, my kindred, and my country nigh
Lasht by the wind, the waves arose & bore;
Our ship in shattered fragments to the shore;
There ye flakld surge opprest my darkening sight,
And there my eyes for ever lost the light
Capt George Colvill, of the private ship of war Amazon & only son of Robert Colvill of Bangor, was wrecked near this ground 25th Feb 1780, in ye 29th year of his age.

The Irish connections to the Titanic disaster have become part of local folklore: urban myths concerning its construction at Harland and Wolf shipyard; apocryphal anecdotes about the liner’s last moments in the icy waters of the Atlantic; legends detailing the contents of its hold; one might be forgiven for believing the ship part of fable, and its fateful maiden voyage part of some ancient saga. We should remember this was a human tragedy on a vast scale. Many of those who perished lie buried in Fairview cemetery in Nova Scotia. One gravestone remembers a crew member and reveres his sacrifice and that of his colleagues:

Each man stood at his post
While all the weaker ones went by
And showed once more to all the world
How Englishmen should die
Sacred to the memory of
Everett Edward Elliott of the heroic crew of the SS Titanic died on duty April 15 1912 aged 24 years

Some verse makes only oblique reference to the maritime aspect of the demise. The following threnody in Holywood cemetery offers an initial vista of cold comfort that gradually shape shifts into a panorama replete with the glorious expectation of heavenly reward. It represents as complete an example of wish fulfilment, or wishful thinking, as one is likely to encounter:

Peace to the tenant of the silent tomb!
That narrow house, but road to future bliss
Though cold and comfortless appears the gloom
To us who shrink beside the vast abyss
We know we all at last must come to this
His loss is mourned but why I cannot say
He's gained a better world by learning this
Tis but a selfish sorrow that would stay
A happy spirit oil the wing for bliss
His presence here however we may miss
A glorious mansion is prepared on high
For him, for thee, and all who love their God
His memory ought not to provoke a sigh
E'en if thy footsteps lead thee to the sod
Where lie his dear remains in dark but short abode.
Sacred to the memory of George Dodshaw of Whitehaven who died at sea on board the Patriot Queen on the 18th of February 1838 aged 27 years

The history of Ireland is a traveller’s tale. The Irish Diaspora washed up many an Hibernian itinerant on a foreign shore, in many different guises: the Wild Geese, the Flight of the Earls, the famine refugees desperately seeking succour in America, the Ulster Scots Dissenters seeking liberties stateside denied them by the Established Church in Ireland, the Fenians and the United Irishmen transported to Botany Bay or Van Diemen’s Land. From Bernardo O’Higgins who became President of Chile, by way of Ned Kelly the Australian bushranger and national icon, to the ubiquitous Irish bar in every flyblown town, the Irish, Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, underclass or overlord, exploiter or victim, have colonised the planet.

Some immigrants will harbour a dewy-eyed version of his or her former homeland. Through their rose-coloured spectacles they deny the negative aspects of their native country that drove them to emigrate in the first place. They maintain through the songs and stories of the past a version of the present that no longer exists. Through the generations they develop a sense of nationality glaringly at odds with the reality lived by the folks back home. Others take a more pragmatic approach.

Here are two examples of verse inscribed by individuals living far from their place of birth. The first details an unusual lament, that of an Englishman who settled in Downpatrick, and found the locals decidedly congenial. He appears to have assimilated with facility:

Oh, if English or native you chance to draw near
Know a stranger in Ireland hath made his home here,
Think not tho'from all he loved best far away
The Englishman found him alone in that day,
When the tired wheels of nature refusing to move
He felt he must die far from home and his love
Ah no! All around him contented to share
The duties a wife would have paid to him there,
For the sons and the daughters of Erin well Know
From their own soft emotions, to feel others woe
And the spirits of friends which from England had flown
Found fit temples of grief in the kind hearts of Down
Sacred to the memory of John Wyatt Lee, Esquire, of London who died at Downpatrick 2nd April 1833 aged 48 years, Downpatrick Church of Ireland churchyard, County Down

The second example conveys the more traditional emotions of an exile who cannot quite cut the umbilical cord attaching him to his homeland:

A wanderer of the race from different climes
Revisiting this spot he penned these lines
And raised this stone to guard in hallowed trust
His kindred’s memory and great-grandsire’s dust
Resting in hope that at the Saviour’s feet
We yet will re-unite when Zion’s pilgrims meet
Boardmills 1st Presbyterian graveyard, County Down. Erected by a certain McKee who lies buried in Woodlawn Cemetery New York

To judge by the inscriptions on local graveyards, Ulster has always been a haven of domestic harmony and a paradise of married bliss. The infidelities of husbands, the shrewishness of wives, the marital peccadilloes that blight connubial contentment, appear to go unrecorded. As with most obituaries, the merits of the respective spouses are emphasised, their less attractive characteristics lie buried with their owners. Some seem too good to be true:

A filial son, a husband true and kind
A calm adviser & instant friend
By justice guided wealth he sought to find
That wealth when found he usefully might spread
Since he loved to teach & to receive
Excels he shun’d but sought the social ring
Worth he prized in beggar or in slave
And spurn’d deceit tho in a priest or king
He strove for truth when truth he thought he scann’d
He branded error while he felt her rod
Yet by kind acts he reverenced his God
Here lies William Logan, died 16th April 1797 aged 29 years
Templecorran graveyard, County Antrim

Other nationalities are not so circumspect in detailing the inadequacies of their partners. The English occasionally take a more prosaic view, replacing the panegyric with more pointed poetry. The views tend to emanate from a misogynistic perspective; the distaff side of the coupling rarely resorting to such dismissive couplets:

The children of Israel wanted bread
And the Lord sent them manna,
Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
And the Devil sent him Anna.
In Ribbesford cemetery, England

Here lies my wife,
Here lies she;
Hallelujah!
Hallelujee!
In a Leeds graveyard [1861]

Even the great English poets were not immune from washing their dirty linen in public. John Dryden (1631 – 1700) had the following backhanded eulogy for his wife:

Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she's at rest, and so am I.

The following epitaph serves as a female counterweight to the black graveyard propaganda illustrated above:

Here lies a poor woman who was always tired;
She lived in a house where help was not hired.
Her last words on earth were: "Dear friends, I am going
Where washing ain't done, nor sweeping, nor sewing:
But everything there is exact to my wishes;
For where they don't eat there's no washing of dishes...
Don't mourn for me now; don't mourn for me never -
I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.
The Tired Woman's Epitaph

Ulster couples tend to eschew grand sentiments, concentrating upon the minutiae of married life and the pain engendered by the sudden sundering of a relationship meant to last a lifetime.

The churchyard bears an added stone,
The fireside shows a vacant chair,
Here sadness dwells and weeps alone,
And death displays his banners there,
The life has gone, the breath has fled,
And what has been no more shall be,
The well known form, the welcome tread
Oh! Where are they and where is she.
Holmes memorial in Raloo graveyard Co Antrim 1838 to his wife Agnes who died aged 33

"a light is from our household gone
a voice we loved is stilled
a place is vacant in our house
which never can be filled"
Erected by Jane Grabbe, in loving memory of her husband Thomas Grabbe, who died 8th February 1897, aged 64 years, St Patrick’s Church of Ireland, Glenarm, County Antrim

The form we used to see
Was but the raiment
That she used to wear.
The grave that now doth press
Upon that cast off dress,
Is but her wardrobe locked
She is not there
William Strain 1885 for his wife Mary, Balmoral Cemetery, Belfast

Here are two poems that take the not uncommon step of putting words into the deceased’s mouth, clearly offering some crumbs of future comfort to the bereaved; the hope that they may be reconciled one day:

Cease my young beloved wife
To sigh above my tomb;
We yet shall meet in land divine
Where death can never come.
Prepare to follow me and join
My sure eternal home.
Erected by Margaret Arthurs for her husband Hugh Mecagherty who died aged 26 1839, Ballypriormore graveyard, Co Antrim

Fairwell, my husband, and my children dear,
Shed not for me one single tear,
You plainly saw my glass was run,
For all that was or could be done,
With you I must no longer stay,
But in my prime I’m called away.
Adair grave, 1811, Bangor Abbey, County Down

Inscriptions are often used to blow the trumpet of the departed and copper fasten his reputation as firmly as the coffin encases his corpse. But rarely can it have been used as a prototypical dating agency or advertising billboard. Life must go on indeed.

Sacred to the memory of
My husband John Barnes
Who died January 3, 1803
His comely young widow, aged 23, has
Many qualifications of a good wife, and
Yearns to be comforted
An epitaph in a Vermont cemetery

If poets cannot fashion a lyrical leave taking for themselves then what hope do the rest of us have? The ability to sum up a life in a few unforgettable phrases is, after all, their stock-in-trade. Sometimes the mots justes that the writer has lined up for his epitaph do find their appointed place on his or her headstone.

We have already encountered William Butler Yeat’s memorable epitaph:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death,
Horseman, pass by!

These lines come from his poem Under Ben Bulben and the final stanza reads:

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:

Yeats got his wish to be laid to rest in his beloved Sligo, but his final burial came after a convoluted process that began with his death in France in 1939 and culminated in his disinterment and relocation to Ireland in 1948.

Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, also crafted his final farewell in the poem Requiem, and its final three lines are inscribed upon his tombstone on a Samoan hillside.

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.

Rupert Brooke, the war poet, has written one of the most famous and affecting elegies in the whole literary canon:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England

Yet these prophetic lines do not adorn his gravestone. He did die, and does lie buried, in a foreign field, but his inscription is of a more prosaic nature. He succumbed to blood poisoning on April 23, 1915 on the French hospital ship Duguay-Trouin moored in Trebuki Bay on the Greek island of Skyros. He was carried to his grave in an olive grove in a torch lit procession. He is buried in a cairn grave with a crude wooden cross bearing the legend:

Here Lies a Servant of God
Sub-Lieutenant in the English Navy
Who Died for the Deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks

In the Protestant cemetery in Rome, the graves of two of England’s greatest and most infamous poets can be found, Keats and Shelley.

This Grave
contains all that was Mortal
of a
Young English Poet
Who
on his Death Bed
in the Bitterness of his Heart
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies
Desired
these words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone

"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."
John Keats, Protestant Cemetery, Rome

Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange
Percy Bysshe Shelley Protestant cemetery Rome

Oscar Wilde had long been a refugee from the country of his birth. He died in France, and is buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, beneath an elaborate Jacob Epstein sculpture, upon which the following lines are inscribed:

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
Oscar Wilde Pere Lachaise, Paris

The national bards of Scotland and England, Robert Burns and William Shakespeare, lie in their native lands, their tombs engraved with poetry somewhat less memorable than their own majestic muses might have warranted:

O Rabbie Burns, the Man, the Brither
And art thou goune--and gone for ever;
And has thou crossed that unknown river,
Life's dreary bound?
Like thee, where shall we find anither
The world around?
Go to your sculptur'd ash of state;
But by thy honest tombs, ye Great,
In all the tinsel tr turf I'll wait,
Thou man of worth.
And weep the sweetest poet's fate,
E'er lived on earth.
To the Memory of Robert Burns the Ayrshire Bard who was born at Doonside
On the 29th of January 1759, and died at Dumfries on the 22nd of July 1796

Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To digg the dust encloased heare!
Blest be the man that spares thes stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
William Shakespeare Stratford on Avon

Ulster has its own Nobel Prize winning poet in the living form of Bellaghy’s Seamus Heaney. Amongst the fraternity of deceased versifiers, we offer two candidates for the mantle of bardic champion: James Orr, the Bard of Ballycarry and Francis Davis, the Weaver Poet.

While truth and right bless Erin's plains Or freedom's sons her standard rear,
Or while they spumat slavry's chains, The name of Orr they ~ revere
The venal lay his soul despised, For virtue fair the lyre he strung,
For truth and right he ever prized, And truth and right he nobly sung
His friendship true and ever kind To kindred bosoms still was shown;
His generous heart which God refined, Made love and sympathy its own
If genius and truth, taste combined, With candour fair can honour claim,
Posterity his brows bind With bays of never ending fame
His name Broad Land ~ revere, Nor fail to have him memoryed,
Who oft in numbers strong and clear Her rural scenes immortalized
No more his Brethem kind and bright Shall him invest with honours grand
No more hell teach the rules of right, That guide to light the sacred band
No more alive hell tune the lyre, And bid dull care away depart,
Or wake the strains which mirth inspire And soothe to peace the troubled heart
Near Templecorran's ruined fane That with the wild blast nods he lies
Where solitude and silence reign, Till the last trump shall bid him rise
"When lost amang nettles, yell fmd if ye search My stane o' remembrance is marked with an arch" Sacred to the memory of James Orr, The Bard of Ballycarry, Obiit 24 April 1816 AE 46

Erin, loved land! from age to age Be thou more great, more fam'd and free This monument to the Poet, the Patriot and the Philanthropist was erected by the contributions of various liberal individuals in Broadisland, Carrickfergus, Isle Magee, Larne, Belfast, Ballymena, & of the following Masonic Lodges, viz the Grand Lodge of Ireland and Nos 41, 43, 107, 162, 175, 177, 258, 248, 253, 615, 1012, and 1014, Orr's own Lodge.
Templecorran cemetery, County Antrim

With the soul of a loving and chivalrous knight
Whose instinct is genius, whose language is light
A child of the people has builded a name,
And the weaver has woven a garment of fame
In memory of Francis Davis, Ireland's weaver poet, born 1810, died 1885
Love of the right and hate of the wrong To Francis Davis, a self taught scholar, a gifted poet and an ardent patriot, this cross has been erected in token of admiration for his brilliant genius and purity of purpose by the memorial committee of the Belfast Young Ireland Society
Milltown cemetery, Belfast

A sense of humour is not usually a required part of the repertory for a scribe composing verse for a headstone. While an ability to laugh at the foibles of the living is a near prerequisite for staying sane, there is an unwritten rule that renders the dead beyond the pale when it comes to mirth.

Death often disarms critics; the deceased, no matter how obnoxious or curmudgeonly when alive, suddenly becomes a paragon of every earthly virtue, a being of exemplary morals, and a person to be admired and emulated.

However, caustic crypt writers do, on occasion, baulk at this convention with some irreverent tombstone testimonials. Locally, there is precious little evidence of humour being used on a gravestone; the following verse on the headstone of a certain Young who died in 1776, being as close as we are likely to get;

Here lies interred beneath this stone
The Commodore who oft times shone
In cracking jokes with many a guest
And chanting songs in merry taste
Punctual and just in all his dealings
Yet said himself he had his failings
Bad qualities if he had any
Were very few, his good ones many.
His heart and hand were always ready
To serve the poor and help the needy
Had gratitude in high perfection
And died in hopes of resurrection
Dundonald Graveyard, County Down

A politician is probably as ripe a candidate as anyone for a less than fulsome funereal tribute. The following withering rejoinder was written by no less a personage than Lord Byron. His subject was Lord Castlereagh, whose ancestral home at Mount Stewart is now a beautifully managed National Trust property. Castlereagh was British Foreign Secretary and played a leading role at the Congress of Vienna where a post-Napoleonic order was imposed upon Europe. He committed suicide following a bout of depression, but even this tragic end did not stay Byron’s irreverent hand. As rhyming raspberries go, this one is hard to beat:

Posterity will ne'er survey
a nobler grave than this.
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh
Stop, traveller, and piss.

We end this survey of headstone poetry with a dose of disrespectful dirges. Death is no laughing matter but then again:

Here lies Ann Mann,
Who lived an old maid
But died an old Mann.
Dec. 8, 1767
In a London cemetery

Here lies
Johnny Yeast
Pardon me
For not rising.
In Ruidoso cemetery, New Mexico,

Here lies the body
of Jonathan Blake
Stepped on the gas
Instead of the brake.
Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery

Here lays Butch,
We planted him raw.
He was quick on the trigger,
But slow on the draw.
In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery

Reader if cash thou art
In want of any
Dig 4 feet deep
And thou wilt find a Penny.
John Penny's epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery

On the 22nd of June
Jonathan Fiddle -
Went out of tune.
In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England

Here lies one Wood
Enclosed in wood
One Wood
Within another.
The outer wood
Is very good:
We cannot praise
The other.
In Memory of Beza Wood Departed this life
Nov. 2, 1837 Aged 45 yrs.

Under the sod and under the trees
Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.
He is not here, there's only the pod:
Pease shelled out and went to God
On a grave from the 1880's in Nantucket, Massachusetts

Tom Smith is dead, and here he lies,
Nobody laughs and nobody cries;
Where his soul's gone, or how it fares,
Nobody knows, and nobody cares.
In Newbury, England [1742]

Beneath this stone, in hopes of Zion,
Doth lie the landlord of the Lion;
His son keeps on the business still,
Resigned unto the heavenly will.
On an innkeeper 1875

And in conclusion …

Whatever one’s political persuasion, one has to acknowledge that death does have a tendency to accentuate the egalitarian aspects of existence. Grandiose mausoleums, capacious vaults, elaborate sculptures, hagiographical encomiums; all may try to elevate one dead individual over another, but mortality undercuts this vainglory and reasserts the truth that we are all poor players fretting and strutting our hour upon the stage.

As this poem on a Devon tombstone makes clear, it’s not the state of your grave but the state of your soul that counts in the final reckoning:

Here lie I by the chancel door;
They put me here because I was poor.
The further in, the more you pay,
But here I lie as snug as they.