The Grave

The Grave is a long blank verse poem by Robert Blair, the Scottish poet and minister, first published in 1743. It belongs to the eighteenth-century tradition of graveyard poetry, in which the speaker reflects on death, the resting places of the dead and the fate that awaits the living. Blair uses the churchyard as a setting for meditation on mortality, suggesting that rank, wealth and power all end in the same earth.

An edition published in 1808 included engravings by William Blake, which helped keep the poem known to readers of English verse. It will appeal to those interested in eighteenth-century poetry and in the literature of mortality and the reminder of death.