A Church-Yard Scene
John
Wilson
Wilson, John (pseudonym Christopher North
)
Eremus
Metadata research and editing
DVPP Project Team
Fralick
Kaitlyn
University of Victoria Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry Project
Victoria, BC, Canada
In the public domain
Poet attribution: The Works of Professor Wilson, Blackwood, 1858, vol. 12, pp. 239-40. (AC)
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
6
36
679–680
How sweet and solemn, all alone,
text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 80%; letter-spacing: 0.07em;
margin-left: 5em; margin-bottom: 1em;
font-variant: small-caps; text-align: left; margin-left: 19.25em; margin-top:
-2.15em; letter-spacing: 0.07em;
font-variant: small-caps; letter-spacing: 0.025em;
display: none;
display: inline;
display: block;
font-size: 1rem; width: 36em;
Auto-tagged instances of cross-stanza rhyme based on existing labels.
Created pom_7887_incid_poem rendition to reset font-sizes.
CSS remediation, verified.
Added useful rendition elements in anticipation of CSS reworking.
Marking specific renditions as incidental.
Handle base cases of incidental titles.
Extracted small-caps style into rendition element using XSLT.
Re-organized change elements in descending date order.
Added @rhyme to poem div.
Removed catRef with target="dvpp:illustrationNone", now obsolete.
Tweaked rhyme attributes.
Document is proofed. Set status to 'proofed'. Altered spacing and rhyme labels. Moved long
strings of CSS to the tagsDecl.
A Church-Yard Scene
.
How sweet and solemn, all alone,
With reverend steps, from stone to stone
In a small village church-yard lying,
O’er intervening flowers to move !
And as we read the names unknown
Of young and old to judgment gone,
And hear in the calm air above
Time onwards softly flying,
To meditate, in Christian love,
Upon the dead and dying !
Across the silence seem to go
With dream-like motion, wavery, slow,
And shrouded in their folds of snow,
The friends we loved long long ago !
Gliding across the sad retreat,
How beautiful their phantom feet !
What tenderness is in their eyes,
Turned where the poor survivor lies
’Mid monitory sanctities !
What years of vanished joy are fanned
From one uplifting of that hand
In its white stillness ! when the shade
Doth glimmeringly in sunshine fade
From our embrace, how dim appears
This world’s life through a mist of tears !
Vain hopes ! blind sorrows ! needless fears !
Such is the scene around me now :
A little Church-yard on the brow
Of a green pastoral hill ;
It’s sylvan village sleeps below,
And faintly here is heard the flow
Of Woodburn’s summer rill ;
A place where all things mournful meet,
And yet the sweetest of the sweet,
The stillest of the still !
With what a pensive beauty fall
Across the mossy mouldering wall
That rose-tree’s clustered arches ! See
The robin-redbreast warily,
Bright through the blossoms, leaves his nest :
Sweet ingrate ! through the winter blest
At the firesides of men—but shy
Through all the sunny summer-hours,
He hides himself among the flowers
In his own wild festivity.
What lulling sound, and shadow cool
Hangs half the darkened church-yard o’er,
From thy green depths so beautiful
Thou gorgeous sycamore !
Oft hath the holy wine and bread
Been blest beneath thy murmuring tent,
Where many a bright and hoary head
Bowed at that awful sacrament.
Now all beneath the turf are laid
On which they sat, and sang, and prayed.
Above that consecrated tree
Ascends the tapering spire that seems
To lift the soul up silently
To heaven with all its dreams,
While in the belfry, deep and low,
From his heaved bosom’s purple gleams
The dove’s continuous murmurs flow,
A dirge-like song, half-bliss, half-woe,
The voice so lonely seems !
Eremus
.