Epitaph
What is life, 'tis all a vapour Tho' long on earth we both did stay Our time was wasted like a taper Fleeting soon it died away. Two hundred years ago, Thomas Harris and his wife Elizabeth were buried in Old Somerby churchyard. They both died in the 1820s having reached great ages for their time. Thomas was 82 and Elizabeth was 79. I am sure that their skilfully carved slate gravestone once stood upright but nowadays it lies horizontal in the grass. Possibly a modern health and safety matter. But what really caught my eye about their gravestone was the epitaph at the bottom. It seems devoid of religious content or any ambition to achieve an after-life state of being. It could have almost been written by the existentialist playwright - Samuel Beckett. A world without a benign "God" watching over them like a shepherd and maybe a pointless world too. The four lines do not make great poetry. They seem rather amateurish to me but the meaning is clear. You can sense the ...