In Memory
of Ramick Knowles son
to Mr Ramick & Mrs Mary
Knowles who died June 3
1803 in the 10th year of
his age.
The grave is near the cradle seen
How swift the moments rool between
And whisper as they fly
Unthinking man remember this
Thou midst of sublunary bliss
Must groan and gasp and die
The image of the grave adjacent to the cradle is very common in the devotional writing of the time, and therefore appears often on these epitaphs. You can see the same sentiment Isaac Watts and the Graveyard Poets often expressed, that our mortal, worldly, sublunary bliss is not going to last very long. But this has a much darker, more ominous tone, don’t you think? That last line almost invokes the Classic – the warning to prepare is not stated, but it sure is implied.
The source is a hymn by Thomas Greene, Soliloquy on the Eve of New Year’s Day. The original context is a grown man contemplating the inevitable passage of time; for young Ramick Knowles, these lines are no mere figure of speech! Greene was an English clergyman – not a very prolific writer; this is the only work of his I have found chosen in these burial grounds. But it’s not bad.:
My days, my weeks, my months, my years,
Fly rapid as the whirling spheres
Around the steady pole:
Time, like the tide, its motion keeps,
Till I must launch through boundless deeps,
Where endless ages roll.
The grave is near the cradle seen:
The moments swiftly pass between,
And whisper as they fly:
Unthinking man, remember this,
Though fond of sublunary bliss,
Thou soon must gasp and die.
My soul, attend the solemn call:
Thy crazy cottage soon will fall,
And thou must take thy flight
Above yon wide aetherial blue,
To love and sing as angels do,
Or sink in endless night.
Eternal bliss, or endless woe,
Hangs on this inch of time below,
This poor precarious breath:
The God of nature only knows,
Whether another year shall close,
Ere I expire in death.
That image of the body as a crazy cottage what will soon fall it good. And look carefully at the next two verses of the hymn – which of course the Knowles family and all their neighbors would have known. They tell us that the fate of the soul is by no means certain – young Ramick might be singing like an angel, or sunk in endless night. One’s eternal fate hangs by a slender thread, an inch of time, that could be ended any moment.
This choice of epitaph neatly illustrates a very important point I have made elsewhere in this blog: These Congregationalists were constantly wrestling with these two conflicting attitudes towards death: They were gripped individually and collectively by an intense and unremitting fear of what might happen after death, while simultaneously clinging to the Christian view of death as a release and relief for the earth-bound soul
A lot has been written about these contemporaneous, conflicting attitudes and how they played out in sermons and religious writing – I see the same struggle recorded in gravestones,
