Caroline Wigley was born in 1801 to parents Edmund Meysey-Wigley and his wife Anna Maria in Brompton Road. When she was two, she had a severe illness that left her partially paralyzed in both legs, and she had to walk with the assistance of a cane. As Caroline grew older, her sister wrote that it became more difficult for Caroline to deal with her disability. Caroline would often retreat inward and develop her intellect to cope with her challenges. This would explain her contemplation of health, sickness, and death throughout much of her writing. She began writing as a young adult, and her first notable work was her book of nine poems. In the same year, she published the following poem in IX Poems, she married Reverend Archer Clive. She then went on to publish more successful poetry and two successful novels about a character named Paul Ferrol (Paul Ferrol and Why Paul Ferrol Killed His Wife). She tragically died in a house fire in 1873. 

"The Grave"

Date of Publication: This poem is a part of her 1840 work IX Poems. It was published in a duodecimo and reviewed by Henry Nelson Coleridge in the Quarterly Review. She published the second edition of her book of poems in 1841 with nine additional poems. 

Caroline Clive’s “The Grave” is the third poem in her book of nine poems published under the nom de plume, V. The following piece gained attention from contemporary critics for its metaphors and motifs, a strong yet simple voice in the lines, and a moving theme. This book of poetry was known as a part of the forefront of contemporary feminine verse. However, readers did not initially know the female voice behind the work. Henry Nelson Coleridge praised the author for his “sternness and masculinity.” When Clive became more well-known, she revealed her female identity. In 1849, Dr. John Brown wrote in the North British Review, “They [poems] combine rare excellencies; the strength, the finish, the gravity of a man’s thoughts, with the tenderness, the insight, the constitutional sorrowfulness of a woman’s—her purity, her passionateness, her delicate and just sense expression.” In her writing, Clive explores images of light and darkness, health and sickness, and life and death. An interesting facet of this poem is that she personifies Death, multiple times. In this poem, the speaker observes thousands who were "swept into the arms of Death"(24). This poem uses a simple meter and rhyme scheme, but its merit is found in the distinct and moving images Clive uses to convey the reality of death, regardless of class, race, or generation. She references Christ as the only one who has been able to escape death, which reinforces her thematic throughline that “all have died, the Earth’s whole race”(57). This poem initiates an interesting conversation about feminine verse and the thematic contemplation of death in the 19th century making it an excellent entry to be anthologized. 

III.

THE GRAVE.

I STOOD within the grave’s o’ershadowing vault;
Gloomy and damp it stretch’d its vast domain;
Shades were its boundary; for my strain’d eye sought
For other limit to its width in vain.

Faint from the entrance came a daylight ray,
And distant sound of living men and things;
This, in th’ encount’ring darkness pass’d away,
That, took the tone in which a mourner sings.

I lit a torch at a sepulchral lamp, 1 
Which shot a thread of light amid the gloom;
And feebly burning ’gainst the rolling damp,
I bore it through the regions of the tomb.

Around me stretch’d the slumbers of the dead,
Whereof the silence ached upon mine ear;
More and more noiseless did I make my tread,
And yet its echoes chill’d my heart with fear.

The former men of every age and place,
From all their wand’rings gather’d, round me lay;
The dust of wither’d Empires did I trace,
And stood ’mid Generations pass’d away.

I saw whole cities, that in flood or fire,
Or famine or the plague, gave up their breath;
Whole armies whom a day beheld expire,
By thousands swept into the arms of Death.

I saw the old world’s white and wave‐swept bones,
A giant heap of creatures that had been;
Far and confused the broken skeletons
Lay strewn beyond mine eye’s remotest ken. 2

Death’s various shrines—The Urn, the Stone, the Lamp— 3
Were scatter’d round, confus’d, amid the dead;
Symbols and Types were mould’ring in the damp,
Their shapes were waning, and their meaning fled. 4

Unspoken tongues, perchance in praise or woe,
Were character’d on tablets Time had swept;
And deep were half their letters hid below
The thick small dust of those they once had wept.

No hand was here to wipe the dust away;
No reader of the writing traced beneath;
No spirit sitting by its form of clay;
No sigh nor sound from all the heaps of Death.

One place alone had ceased to hold its prey:
A form had press’d it and was there no more;
The garments of the Grave beside it lay,
Where once they wrapp’d him on the rocky floor. 5

He only with returning footsteps broke
Th’ eternal calm wherewith the Tomb was bound;
Among the sleeping Dead alone he woke,
And bless’d with outstretch’d hands the host around.

Well is it that such blessing hovers here,
To soothe each sad survivor of the throng, 6
Who haunt the portals of the solemn sphere,
And pour their woe the loaded air along.

They to the verge have follow’d what they love,
And on th’ insuperable threshold stand;
With cherish’d names its speechless calm reprove,
And stretch in the abyss their ungrasp’d hand.

All that have died, the Earth’s whole race, repose
Where Death collects his Treasures, heap on heap;
O’er each one’s busy day the nightshades close;
Its Actors, Sufferers, Schools, Kings, Armies—sleep.