Is all thou shalt have.
This interesting monument has unfortunately disappeared. Doubtless there are many other traces of the poem to be found, but it appears to have been rarely used on tombstones after 1700,[27] and earlier monuments, unless specially preserved, are rarely decipherable at the present day.
[ Literary Interest.]
Erthe upon Erthe cannot be said to possess great literary value in itself. The interest of the poem lies chiefly in its evident popularity, and in the insight it gives into the kind of literature which became popular in the Middle Ages. It belongs essentially to the same class as the Soul and Body Poems, and the Dance of Death. In the early days of its introduction into Western Europe, Christianity made great use in its appeal to the mass of the people of the fear of death and dread of the Judgement. The early monastic writers dwelt upon the idea of man’s mortality and decay, and the transitoriness of human rank and pleasure. Hence the frequency with which such themes as the Dance of Death were treated in literature and in art. Closely allied with this idea of the fleeting nature of earthly things, and to some extent a result of it, was the conception of the separation of man’s bodily from his spiritual self which pervades all mediaeval post-Christian literature. In Old English times already, this sense of a sharp division between the two is embodied in No. xliv of the O.E. Riddles:—
[28] Ic wat indryhtne æþelum deorne
ȝiest in ȝeardum, þæm se grimma ne mæg
hunger sceððan ne se hata þurst,
yldo ne adle [ne se enga deað],
ȝif him arlice esne þenað,
se þe agan sceal [his ȝeongorscipe]