Godwin’s second wife and collaborator, Mary Jane Clairmont, stayed here. Godwin too was buried here initially, but Mary Shelley’s surviving son had the bodies exhumed and interred together with his mother’s remains in Bournemouth. Mary died wife to the anarchist philosopher, novelist and pamphleteer, William Godwin, and mother to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who eloped with Percy Shelley in 1814. Graveyards, though, prompt genealogies in the ‘mind of the spectator’. But then we also have Maggie Hambling’s silver memorial that celebrates Wollstonecraft controversially in all her bravery in Newington Green. We should ‘mark the place and leave the rest to the mind of the spectator’. It is uncharacteristically discreet, but in keeping with the recommendations that her husband, William Godwin, would make in his 1809 Essay on Sepulchres for remembering the ‘illustrious dead’. Here in St Pancras Churchyard lies the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft. If we challenge mortality and say, ‘Death thou shalt die!’ we are quoting John Donne, resurrecting him in the process, as well as reviving the Shelley who wrote, again in Adonais: ‘He lives, he wakes-’tis Death is dead, not he / Mourn not for Adonais.’ Keats’s decomposition turns into his greatest and most lasting composition – his poetry, and his poetry’s contribution to our language. When are destroyed, so as to produce only dust, Nature asserts an empire over them: and the vegetative world rises in constant youth, and vitality and beauty adorn the wrecks of monuments, which were once raised for purposes of glory.Īnd in his elegy to John Keats, Adonais, Percy Shelley had shared this graveyard optimism: ‘He is made one with nature, there is heard / His voice in all her music’.
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