Early Music III

Musick for the Funerall Of Queen Mary (1695)
Henry Purcell (1659-1695)

"A dead Queen is a terrible thing",
Master Purcell said as I tugged at the
high starched collar tickling my neck,
"so I've written some terrible music to send her off!"
We all laughed and it helped:
we were but boys and that
glimpse we had of Her, shuffling past, was frightening
—fat and waxy and ... dead.
He must have loved her to write so, I think.
I practiced hard not to catch my throat in "Suffer us not"
for it made me want to cry and it was anyway
excellent hard to sing.

Died in December, buried in March:
heaps of flowers helped, and the
Abbey was cold and
cold captures smells wondrously.
I'm old now, forty and counting, and I'm
tired of funerals, tired of death,
but one memory makes me shiver still:
Queen Mary's corpse appeared below, and the
black-shrouded mass arose as
Master Purcell struck up sackbuts and drums
in such a deadmarch it made my heart
stop like the Queen's.

I shook as I sang but I didn't mis-sing
--not then, though I did
mere months later when we
played him to rest.
No royal tomb, but better—
by the organ loft
in the North Aisle,
buried in music.