Death the fair fabric from its base o’erthrows
And, for the promised bliss, gives real woes.
Eliza Dow
Daughter of Betsey Work
Died Jany 22d. 1806
Aged 14.
This brief couplet appears in book of poetry compiled by Abiel Holmes (1763-1847), the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and son-in-law of Ezra Stiles, one-time President of Yale University. The Reverend Holmes was a Congregational clergyman and historian of considerable merit. In 1792 he became the minister of the famous First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a post he held until his resignation in 1831 amid raging theological disputes within his congregation.
Holmes published many sermons, and also found time to write several works of biography and American history. He also published A Family Tablet (1796), a charming collection of devotional poems, by or about departed friends. One of these, Sonnet on Mrs. K.T.S. Who Died Within a Year of Marriage. is the source of Eliza Dow’s epitaph:
Read yonder stone and, reading, heedful learn
With temper’d hopes thy structured bliss to rear;
Ovander there, at lov’d Elivra’s urn,
O’er bliss departed sheds the sorrowing tear:
Young, fair, and blooming, like the opening rose
Which breathes its fragrance o’er the genial morn,
Blest with those charms which ne’er their influence lose,
And all the virtues which the sex adorn;
What joys domestic did her worth insure
To Fancy’s eye, and to the heart of love?
With such a prize — of earthly bliss secure,
What could the fabric of his joys remove?
One stroke that fabric from its base o’erthrows,
And, for promis’d bliss, gives real woes.
Evidently the Reverend Holmes’s book was read and admired in central Connecticut within ten years of its publication. It is heart-felt piece of work (albeit not a great work of art), and I like the poet’s conceit of our sublunary happiness as a structure we build, the fabric of an edifice of our own creation which is ever at risk of collapse. We can see why the image of a young woman “fair, and blooming, like the opening rose” would have appealed to the bereaved mother Betsey. I would like to know more about the family story here — why only the mother’s name on the stone? And why different surnames? Perhaps the father, Mr. Dow, died young, and his widow remarried a Mr. Work.
