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Poem: “Stanzas Occasioned by Lord Bellamont’s …” by Philip Freneau

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American Literature – American Poetry – Philip Freneau – Poems by Philip Freneau
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Stanzas Occasioned by Lord Bellamont’s, Lady Hay’s,
and Other Skeletons Being Dug up in Fort George (N. Y.), 1790

To sleep in peace when life is fled,
Where shall our mouldering bones be laid;
What care can shun (I ask with tears)
The shovels of succeeding years!

Some have maintained, when life is gone,
This frame no longer is our own:
Hence doctors to our tombs repair,
And seize death’s slumbering victims there.

Alas! what griefs must man endure!
Not even in forts he rests secure:
Time dims the splendours of a crown,
And brings the loftiest rampart down.

The breath, once gone, no art recalls!
Away we haste to vaulted walls:
Some future whim inverts the plain,
And stars behold our bones again.

Those teeth, dear girls—so much your care—
(With which no ivory can compare),
Like these (that once were Lady Hay’s),
May serve the belles of future days.

Then take advice from yonder scull;
And, when the flames of life grow dull,
Leave not a tooth in either jaw,
Since dentists steal and fear no law.

He that would court a sound repose,
To barren hills and deserts goes:
Where busy hands admit no sun,
Where he may doze till all is done.

Yet there, even there, though slily laid,
‘Tis folly to defy the spade:
Posterity invades the hill,
And plants our relics where she will.

But oh! forbear the rising sigh!
All care is past with them that die:
Jove gave, when they to fate resign’d,
An opiate of the strongest kind:

Death is a sleep that has no dreams,
In which all time a moment seems;
And skeletons perceive no pain
Till Nature bids them wake again.

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American Literature – American Poetry – Philip Freneau – Poems by Philip Freneau

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