![]() Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille was published in Irish Gaelic in 1949. In the following century, this sort of thing inspired a proto-Gothic style in poetry that critics have come to call “Graveyard School.” Thomas Parnell’s “A Night-Piece on Death” (1721) describes “Shades” rising from their graves to address the living: “all with sober Accent cry, / Think, Mortal, what it is to dye.” When we compel them to speak – and we do so all the time – the dead and their representatives tend to be eloquent, if hackneyed, moralizers, communicating maxims of unassailable good sense from so many posthumous pulpits. When William Shakespeare, who was De Gheyn’s contemporary, wrote Hamlet’s plaintive address to poor Yorick’s skull, he installed memento mori at the top rank of the English theatrical canon. ![]() Memento mori – Latin for “remember that you must die” – is one of the more resilient motifs in all of art, and vanitas, as in this 1603 example by Jacques de Gheyn II, one of its most resounding statements. In vanitas, a wide array of symbols – including skulls and other human remains – teach viewers about the fleetingness of human existence, and about the virtues they had therefore better cultivate. Consider, for instance, vanitas, a genre of still-life painting developed by artists of the Dutch Golden Age. ![]() Walter Ralegh complained of “cruel time” that “in the dark and silent grave / When we have wandered all our ways” it “Shuts up the story of our days.” This is decease as the end of narrative, or, at least, of narrative control: if, as the cliché goes, dead men tell no tales, the still-living never shirk from making ventriloquists’ puppets of them. Death is the end of lots of things, not least speech. ![]()
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