As part of Stainless Steel’s RIP event today I am posting about Graveyards.  In keeping with my blog, which is mainly about books, I decided to give this a bit of an emphasis on poetry.  Okay, firstly, I don’t know a lot about poetry and frankly I don’t read a lot of it on a regular basis so I’m definitely no expert.  However, I started having a look for a poem and instead of coming up with just a poem I came up with the Graveyard Poets.  No doubt everybody but me knows about the Graveyard Poets!  But, just in case there is the odd person out there who shares my lack of knowledge below is a little paragraph I found on Wiki:

“The “Graveyard Poets” were a number of pre-Romantic English poets of the 18th century characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, ‘skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms’ in the context of the graveyard. To this was added, by later practitioners, a feeling for the ‘sublime’  and uncanny, and an interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk poetry. They are often reckoned as precursors of the Gothic genre.”

The earliest poem that seems to be recognised from this group was from Thomas Parnell in 1721 and was called ‘A night Piece on Death’.  This is a fairly lengthy poem but I’ve pasted below a little section which I particularly enjoyed reading (with my macabre taste and all) probably because it’s Death doing the speaking: