The Soul Of A Cemetary

I love cemeteries. No seriously I do. In my home town we have a beautiful cemetery that I absolutely love. People find them creepy, scary, or gross; I find them beautiful and peaceful and spiritual. They are places to be quiet, to be sad, to mourn, to feel. I love Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" because I think it correctly captures the loneliness and silence that exists in cemeteries. It is undeniably a sad poem. It speaks of lives lost too soon and as every life has more to live perhaps every death is too soon. One of my favorite stanzas is "Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid-Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire-Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed-Or walk to ecstasy in living lyre". This is beautiful but it focuses on death in a way i think we sometimes do not-death as the absence of life, of being able to live. That sounds obvious but when we look at graves, I think we sometimes fail to realize that the person whose death is marked there was once a living, breathing being with opinions and feelings and passions. We forget to think-who were they and what would they have been? Another of my favorite stanzas is at the end "On some fond breast the parting soul relies-Some pious drops the closing eye requires; Ev'n from the tomb the voice of nature cries-Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires". For some reason this stanza took spoke to me of the soul of the cemetary. Sometimes when death happens, we move on too quickly. We live in a culture that has forgotten how to grieve. For some reason we feel that the best thing is to move forward, move away, leave the dead behind. That's the wonderful thing about cemetary's. It is a place where we can go to be reminded of the souls lost. Not that life should be consumed with grief but cemetaries or churchyard's provide a place for us to mourn the losses. A sanctuary of sorrow, if you will. I think that was one of Gray's ideas when writing this poem.