Epitaph
Towards the end of his life, Elliott suffered much pain and depression. His thoughts often turned to his own death and he wrote his own epitaph:
The Poet's Epitaph
- Stop, Mortal! Here thy brother lies,
- The Poet of the Poor
- His books were rivers, woods and skies,
- The meadow and the moor,
- His teachers were the torn hearts’ wail,
- The tyrant, and the slave,
- The street, the factory, the jail,
- The palace – and the grave!
- The meanest thing, earth’s feeblest worm,
- He fear’d to scorn or hate;
- And honour’d in a peasant’s form
- The equal of the great.
- But if he loved the rich who make
- The poor man’s little more,
- Ill could he praise the rich who take
- From plunder’d labour’s store
- A hand to do, a head to plan,
- A heart to feel and dare –
- Tell man’s worst foes, here lies the man
- Who drew them as they are.
After his death, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem in his memory, titled Elliott.
A bronze statue of Elliott by Neville Northey Burnard, paid for by the people of Sheffield and Rotherham, was erected in 1854 in Sheffield market-place at a cost of £600. The statue was moved to Weston Park, Sheffield, in 1874, where it remains.
Read more about this topic: Ebenezer Elliott
Famous quotes containing the word epitaph:
“The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“And were an epitaph to be my story
Id have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lovers quarrel with the world.”
—Robert Frost (18741963)
“That land is like an Eagle, whose young gaze
Feeds on the noontide beam, whose golden plume
Floats moveless on the storm, and in the blaze
Of sunrise gleams when Earth is wrapped in gloom;
An epitaph of glory for the tomb
Of murdered Europe may thy fame be made,
Great People! as the sands shalt thou become;
Thy growth is swift as morn, when night must fade;
The multitudinous Earth shall sleep beneath thy shade.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (17921822)