English Poetry I: From Chaucer to Gray.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14. |
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| 184. On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey |
| | | Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) |
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| MORTALITY, behold and fear | |
| What a change of flesh is here! | |
| Think how many royal bones | |
| Sleep within these heaps of stones; | |
| Here they lie, had realms and lands, | 5 |
| Who now want strength to stir their hands, | |
| Where from their pulpits seal’d with dust | |
| They preach, ‘In greatness is no trust.’ | |
| Here’s an acre sown indeed | |
| With the richest royallest seed | 10 |
| That the earth did e’er suck in | |
| Since the first man died for sin: | |
| Here the bones of birth have cried | |
| ‘Though gods they were, as men they died!’ | |
| Here are sands, ignoble things, | 15 |
| Dropt from the ruin’d sides of kings: | |
| Here’s world of pomp and state | |
| Buried in dust, once dead by fate. | |
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