The Life of Thomas Hardy
over the remains of a fashionable actor and his wife, while their stone was put in place of his. Future disinterment would make things rather awkward for the old vicar, although the actor, as Hardy remarked, would probably enjoy the situation, having been a comedian.
Continuing in a more serious vein, Hardy declared: "Unhappily it was oftenest the headstones of the poorer inhabitants—purchased and erected in many cases out of scanty means—that suffered the most in these ravages. It is scarcely necessary to particularize among the innumerable instances in which headstones have been removed from their positions, the churchyard levelled, and the stones used for paving the churchyard walks, with the result that the inscriptions have been trodden out in a few years."
The poet's emotional reaction to the same situation was dramatically expressed through a lyric included in Poems of the Past and the Present. It is called The Levelled Churchyard:
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wretched memorial stones!
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
"I know not which I am!"
The verses on the good;
A roaring drunkard sports the text
Teetotal Tommy should!
[92]
