SOURCE: Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. “Decomposing: Wordsworth's Poetry of Epitaph and English Burial Reform.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 42, no. 2 (March 1988): 415-31.

In the following essay, Sanchez-Eppler links Wordsworth's graveyard poetry and his Essay upon Epitaphs to the movement for burial reform, noting Wordsworth's insistence on recognizing the decay and physical reality of death, in contrast to the reformers' efforts to “sanitize” death literally and emotionally.

Then did the little Maid reply, “Seven boys and girls are we; Two of us in the church-yard lie, Beneath the church-yard tree.” 

“You run about, my little maid, Your limbs they are alive; If two are in the church-yard laid, Then ye are only five.” 

—Wordsworth, “We are Seven”

“In our town,” a subscriber wrote to Gentleman's Magazine in 1794, “the venerable remains of the dead ‘hearsed in earth’ have ‘burst their cerements,’ and been exposed to every insult and indignity which the unprotected can experience.”¹ Such...