GRAVE POETRY: St John’s Church, Keele, North Staffordshire
by Charles E S Fairey & Michael ‘Jarl’ Oakes GRAVE POETRY Grave Poetry is a timeless tradition, with many examples up and down the UK. It became especially fashionable during the Victorian Era, when there was much emphasis on death and mourning. This was further reinforced by the sad fact that Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, had died young, and everyone followed her perpetual sense of mourning, she adhered to for the rest of her life. Many of the funeral rules and rituals of today were created back then. The words we find in the poetry upon Georgian and Victorian grave stones, ask the viewer to contemplate their own mortality, and are especially religious, pleading with the reader to take notice of God, and to make peace with Him, but also to ask the beholder, to be mindful that they will also die, so live a good and true life. Some might say that the dead are talking to us from beyond the grave, wishing us to take heed of th...