I have a special love for graveyards whose history is vast and long. I see beauty in the most grandiose of headstones, adorned with minute detail and standing at twice the height of myself, but I also see it in the austere simplicity of the stones pressed into the earth which bear solely the initials of the departed.
I can perceive this in the monuments to life often erected in these spaces. I perceive them to be natural etchings into the landscape as death is inseparable from life, so graveyards are inseparable from the environment. Nor are they places entirely filled with joy and complete peace. However, for me, graveyards are not places entirely laden with grief and misery. Some will certainly take aversion to this kind of dark tourism, believing that it is raising death and suffering on a pedestal. I’m slowly compiling a list of graves I have hopes of visiting in the future on it lie those of Keats and Plath, among those of other literary figures. This adoration for places of rest has continued into adulthood for example, Eastern Cemetery in St Andrews has become one of the dearest places to me in the town. I became acquainted with the idea of death in early childhood, having fond memories of wandering around graveyards with my father in the villages of the Lincolnshire wolds in England. So, given these bleak descriptions, how is it that so many – including myself – are still able to find beauty in such a thing? In the modern linguistic context, this definition has stretched to comprise the very notion of death itself. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, we are also making reference to the “grim, horrific, (and) repulsive” nature of the artistic manifestations of this allegory. When we talk of the macabre, we are making an often inadvertent reference to the medieval allegorical notion of the Danse Macabre: the idea which encompasses the universality and non-discriminatory nature of death. Is it merely a thought of madness in his by this point tuberculosis-wrought mind? Or is there something more poignant here – a certain pleasure in the placidity of the grave, a curiosity surrounding the fate of mortals after that mortality has come to fruition, or simply a state of peace with human fate? Portrait of John Keats Credit: Flickrįinding pleasure in the macabre can be perceived as any one of these, a combination, or as something else entirely. It forces us to consider the object of Keats’ pleasure in this isolated moment. “I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave / thank God for the quiet grave / O! I can feel the cold earth upon me / the daisies growing over me / O for this quiet / it will be my first.”Ĭonsidered by the contemporary mind – one which has become largely unconcerned with, or perhaps even repulsed by, the notion of the macabre compared with the minds of the Romantic poets, this seeming profession of love to his impending death seems curious. Lying on the brink of death in Rome, John Keats penned the following words to his devoted companion Joseph Severn, a young artist and dear friend who had accompanied him to what would soon become his death place: