GRAVE POETRY St Bartholomew’s Church, Norton-le-Moors, North Staffordshire by   Charles E S Fairey & Michael C Oakes   September 2024   GRAVE POETRY   Grave Poetry is a timeless tradition, with many examples up and down the country, but it became especially fashionable during the Victorian Era, when there was much emphasis on death and mourning, especially because Queen Victoria lost her young husband, Prince Albert, and was in a perpetual state of mourning for the rest of her life. There was much written at the time about the rules and forms of mourning.   The words we find in poems upon Georgian and Victorian grave stones, ask the viewer to contemplate their own mortality, and are especially religious, pointing viewers toward belief. It does often seem, as if the Dead are speaking to us, from ‘beyond the grave!’   Gravestones are meant to be immortal, and were believed to last forever, as a shrine for those who cared for the occupant(s), to mourn t