Leaf 180 – Reflections
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| Bernie Wrightson - Illustration for 'Frankenstein' by Mary Shelley (1976) |
In a sense, this haiku is a more succinct version of much a longer poem which I wrote after a visit I made to Abney Park Cemetery in London’s Stoke Newington in 2023. Abney Park is one of London’s “magnificent seven” Victorian cemeteries, now very Romantically and picturesquely overgrown. The date on which I visited happened to be a very serendipitous one, given the chance discovery I made when my eye was caught by a familiar name on one of the headstones (You can read more about this, along with the longer poem, on my other blog here). More generally though, I am always struck by the Victorian’s overly elaborate memorialisation of death, and how not even these large and sometimes quite melodramatic monuments have stood the test of time as they were presumably originally intended to do. Seeing them looking so dishevelled and lopsided today, I can’t help wondering what the Victorians would make of our forgetful neglect which has allowed Mother Nature to reclaim such places. I wonder if they’d be appalled, or if such desuetude might in fact conform to our received ideas of their gloomy, Gothic expectations?
Ivy embracing
an engraved headstone
in loving memory.
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| Zigs1 - Cissies Headstone (2007) Flickr |
