Englishmen Abroad

I am not much for graveyards. My family, back home in Pennsylvania, go into the ground under a broad green lawn, with just flat brass plaques to mark our places. It's all very... restful. Even this, somehow seems too much for me. When I die, let my ashes go wither the wind takes 'em. I was never much for travel, but Gods forbid I'm kept about the house, in box or urn, like salt in a cellar. Let me do good to some tomatoes at least.

But I honor the customs that came before me, and I am even glad of them. When we visited Westminster Abbey, and my friend and I stood before Geoffrey Chaucer's little tomb, occupied or empty and seemingly no bigger than a breadbox, I think we both felt something of the awe one is meant to feel in a cathedral; the presence of history, yes, but also its absence:

"Look! There's Chaucer."

As if the poet, in cut sleeves and a throw-cushion hat, was just over the way from where we stood, eating his lunch, not so dainty, on that little stone box in the niche.

I can't explain it. Some bones are worth keeping. The places where such bones are kept ought to be sacred, ought to be maintained, kept up, seen to as well as seen.

Such a one is the "English" Cemetery in Florence, Italy. The "English" is in quotes because the graveyard's actually Swiss, the grounds purchased by the Swiss Evangelical Reform Church, in 1827. As the Protestant Cemetery, as it might more properly be called, it became the place to plant the remains of non-Catholics who happened to die in Florence. That the most famous occupants are English poets, explains the more popular name.

Among those there entombed, perhaps the most famous is Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A resident of the city at the time of her death, Barrett Browning rather occupies pride of place, in a sepulchre designed by Frederic, Lord Leighton. But there are many other English buried in this place, including two favorites of mine: Walter Savage Landor and Arthur Hugh Clough.

The cemetery fell into disrepair over the years; Napoleon, wars, revolutions and the like will do that. Unlike Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris, which boasts among the host, Oscar Wilde and (shiver) Jim Morrison of The Doors, The English Cemetery in Florence is now not the attraction it once was. But nowadays there is an organized effort to improve the place and make it what it was, a place of poetic pilgrimage and contemplation. A contemplative named Julia Bolton Holloway, American I think, is now the historian and curator of the cemetery. (I've made a link to the blog she has up.) Donations are needed to keep the space sacred and presentable. There is still a chance, as I understand it, that the Swiss who own it may be forced to abandon it altogether.

This mustn't happen.

As this is National Poetry Month, perhaps I might be able to persuade someone to make a donation to the cause? At the very least, if anyone should happen to be in Florence any time hereafter, as I still hope someday to be again myself, if passing that way, flowers might be left on Landor's grave, or Clough's, I would be so very grateful. I owe them much, as do we all.

FOR AN EPITAPH AT FIESOLE

"LO! where the four mimosas blend their shade
In calm repose at last is Landor laid,
For ere he slept he saw them planted here
By her his soul had ever held most dear,
And he had lived enough when he had dried her tear."

Walter Savage Landor