This Monument
Sacred to the memory of
Mr. JOHN TREAT
who in hopes of Glorious Immor
tality departed this life
Octor 19th AD 1794
In the 63d Year of his age...
Though Earth to Earth & dust to dust return
And Silent sorrow sits to guard the Urn
Yet moves the Soul through Ether confin’d
Thrice happy state of the immortal mind
While Angel guards lead on their shining way
To fairer Mansions of unclouded day
In bliss to dwell till the last Trump shall sound
Shall clear the skies, and shake the solid ground
The Elect Redeemed shall wing their Aerial flight
To reign forever in the realms of light.
I find this epitaph completely fascinating.
It is largely bespoke, using familiar imagery but with a lot of movement and action. Note how it provides an unusually detailed eschatology (pardon the SAT word), describing the soul’s step-by-step progress through various stages from death to eternal paradise.
The first two lines earth-bound, static, with the familiar Biblical language of “dust to dust” and a really striking image of Sorrow, like a statue, sitting and guarding the urn that holds John Treat’s ashes. Next the soul moves through the ether to a land where a parade of angels marches it to mansions in the sky Then, after a period of paradise, the trumpet sounds and the ground shakes and the Elect depart for eternity in realms of light. All in all, truly a dynamic tour de force of devotional writing.
But the epitaph is not entirely bespoke. In the middle, we see that two lines quote (without attribution, of course) a funeral ode by Philis Wheatley. Wheatley is a remarkable figure in early American literature; born in West Africa ca. 1753, she was sold into slavery as a child and wound up the property of a Boston family. She was taught to read and write, her owners encouraged her talent, and she became a popular and widely-published poet.
I have encountered several 18th century women poets in the course of my studies, but this is the first time I came upon a verse from Philis Wheatley. A connection like this really brings home to me a vivid scene of writing devotional poems and tracts, printing them as broadsides and pamphlets, distributing them via traveling peddlers and journals and almanacs, or perhaps having them disseminated by ministers traveling from parish to parish, and finally having them falling under the eye of these early New Englanders in the course of their devotional reading – including this now-anonymous poet.
