The mother of beauty …
… The Beauty and Education Offered by Cemeteries.
When Professor Curl first published on cemeteries and funerary art, a magnificent legacy in danger of destruction by deliberate neglect and wilful condescension towards it, his interest was regarded as bizarre, morbid, almost as a kind of intellectual perversion. This was the very reverse of the truth in my opinion: to the contrary, it is the avoidance of all that has to do with death that is perverse.
The title of the post is taken Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”:
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.