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Home  »  The English Poets  »  Extract from A Night-Piece on Death

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. III. The Eighteenth Century: Addison to Blake

Thomas Parnell (1679–1718)

Extract from A Night-Piece on Death

(See full text.)

BY the blue taper’s trembling light,

No more I waste the wakeful night,

Intent with endless view to pore

The schoolmen and the sages o’er:

Their books from wisdom widely stray,

Or point at best the longest way.

I ’ll seek a readier path, and go

Where wisdom ’s surely taught below.

How deep yon azure dyes the sky,

Where orbs of gold unnumber’d lie,

While through their ranks in silver pride

The nether crescent seems to glide!

The slumbering breeze forgets to breathe,

The lake is smooth and clear beneath,

Where once again the spangled show

Descends to meet our eyes below.

The grounds which on the right aspire,

In dimness from the view retire:

The left presents a place of graves,

Whose wall the silent water laves

That steeple guides thy doubtful sight

Among the livid gleams of night.

There pass, with melancholy state,

By all the solemn heaps of fate,

And think, as softly-sad you tread

Above the venerable dead,

‘Time was, like thee they life possest,

And time shall be, that thou shalt rest.’

Those graves, with bending osier bound,

That nameless heave the crumbled ground,

Quick to the glancing thought disclose,

Where toil and poverty repose.

The flat smooth stones that bear a name,

The chisel’s slender help to fame,

(Which ere our set of friends decay

Their frequent steps may wear away,)

A middle race of mortals own,

Men, half ambitious, all unknown.

The marble tombs that rise on high,

Whose dead in vaulted arches lie,

Whose pillars swell with sculptur’d stones,

Arms, angels, epitaphs, and bones,

These, all the poor remains of state,

Adorn the rich, or praise the great;

Who while on earth in fame they live,

Are senseless of the fame they give.

Ha! while I gaze, pale Cynthia fades,

The bursting earth unveils the shades!

All slow, and wan, and wrapp’d with shrouds,

They rise in visionary crowds,

And all with sober accent cry,

‘Think, mortal, what it is to die.’