The 10 best ... famous graves (original) (raw)

Cecil Day-Lewis

Stinsford, DorsetThe fascination with poets’ graves is given a twist here by a complicated private life. Day-Lewis, poet laureate until his death in 1972, was buried alongside his hero, Thomas Hardy, in this Dorset churchyard, despite being in his own words a “churchy agnostic”. On his tombstone are engraved lines from one of his poems: “Shall I be gone long?/ For ever and a day./ To whom there belong?/Ask the stone to say./ Ask my song.” The final payoff, “Quick, Rose, and kiss me”, is omitted. Such a reference to his lover, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, for whom he wrote the poem, would have sat awkwardly given that his widow, the actress Jill Balcon, is now also buried in the same grave, ith a stone of her own