Here is another image from my friend and colleague Bob Drinkwater, the gravestones of three little brothers in Greenfield MA, who died within 10 days of each other of a sudden contagion. Edward Young’s Night Thoughts is once again the source text for the epitaph.

A fine stone in Milford CT combines a remarkably comprehensive description of the progress of a virtuous Congregationalist soul after death with an excerpt from a pioneering Black woman poet.

A splendid table-tomb in Springfield, MA has an epitaph from Edward Young — which in turn may well be linked to a book in the deceased’s library.

A stone in Canterbury, Connecticut, is inscribed with a short passage that conveys the essential argument of Edward Young’s monumental poem Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality.

My friend Betsy McKee shared this elegantly-carved stone from the Old Cemetery in Eastford, CT. Its epitaph verse introduced me to a work of American poetry I had never encountered before.

Another epitaph in Granby has a fine quatrain of English Renaissance poetry.

Granby’s West Street Cemetery is one of the engaging cemeteries that never became disused. You can drive from the current, modern sections back through the grass and trees to the far corner where the stones of the earliest settlers stand. There I found a text from a poem by Isaac Watts, more commonly known as a prolific hymn-writer.

The poetry of Alexander Pope keeps turning up in these graveyards. Here is an epitaph that starts with a couplet from Pope, then an anonymous author proceeds to create some fascinating bespoke lines. The stone lies flat on its back in Russell, Massachusetts, at the edge of a knobby hill near the center of town.