Highgate Cemetery, London

 

“Why are you taking us to the cemetery, Professor?”

I remember D.H. Lawrence saying: “I like to try new things so I can reject them.”

“So you can see how the Victorians pictured their place in history,” I said.

I was with 9 students from Ohio State.

Ravens were sitting atop Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s tomb.

“They buried him with a little bell, in case he should wake up and need rescuing,” I said.

“Karl Marx didn’t get a little bell, and you’ll notice there are no birds on his tomb.” I said.

“George Eliot doesn’t have any birds either, and look, her tomb is sinking. That’s because they buried her with all her books.” I said.

“How do you know her tomb is sinking if you can’t see?” asks a girl.

“Because I read,” I said.

You could hear a day laborer spading up wet earth beside a fallen stone.

 

 

S.K.

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Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University

0 thoughts on “Highgate Cemetery, London”

  1. I’m sorry; I know I make waaay too many comments, but this one was irresistable. Buried in Highgate, also, is Elizabeth Siddel, wife of the poet and general ultra-Romantic Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As a poet, SK, you’ll apprecitate the next little tidbit: After Elizabeth committed suicide over an infant that was stillborn, Rossetti was so despondent, that he buried a book of his poetry with her. Later, he regretted this and had her temporarily exhumed so he could retrieve the poetry.

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  2. “And who, that has felt the burden of
    existence, and suffered under well-meant efforts at consolation, will deny that such consolations are the bitterest of mockeries? Pain is not an evil; death is not a separation; sickness is but a blessing in disguise. Have the gloomiest speculations of avowed pessimists ever tortured sufferers like those kindly platitudes? Is there a more cutting piece of satire in the language than the reference in our funeral service to the ‘sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection’?” Thus spake Sir Leslie Stephens prior to having his carcass stashed in Highgate.

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  3. Hey, that cheap, old codger Leslie Stephen is also stashed at Highgate. I’ll bet he went to bed with a few good books tucked in beside him, too.

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