Deacon
WILLIAM EASTMAN
1793.
In the 75 Year
of his Age.
Thus shall our mouldering members teach
What now our sences learn
For dust & ashes loudest Preach
Man’s infinite Concern.
The source for this text is “Death and Eternity,” a poem from Watts’s Horae Lyricae or Lyric Poems. This collection was popular for private devotional reading; poems from it appear often in these graveyards. This particular passage recurs regularly across time and distance, including Longmeadow (Mercy Stebbins d. 1751), Northampton (Joseph Lyman d. 1763); Enfield Connecticut twice (Samuel Dwight e. 1763 and Dorothy Kibbe d. 1781), and Old Bennington( Elnathan Hubbel d. 1801).
I can easily understand its popularity. The poem, which was later set to music and used as a hymn, is a spiritual reflection on the dust and bones and clay of this mortal earth, the great uncertain ocean we must face when we leave the shore and journey to either “swim in heavenly bliss, / Or sink in flaming waves, / While the pale carcass thoughtless lies / Among the silent graves.” Thus, Watts tells us, the sight of death is the most powerful of sermons on the the need to prepare our souls — our infinite concern,
A variation on this text in Salem (Alice Orne, d. 1776) makes Watts’s lesson even more clear:
This Stone has Something great to teach
And what you need to learn;
For Graves, my friends, most loudly preach
Mans Infinite Concern.
That could be the epigram for my project: “This Stone has Something great to teach.”
