"Vicar, do you know that poem about death?"

I took a funeral this week, in which the family chose as a reading the notorious poem Henry Scott Holland, "Death is nothing at all"
It's a poem I've never really appreciated, since it seems to minimise the reality of death, and it's frankly uncomfortable to stand among the weeping mourners and assert feebly, "I have only slipped away into the next room." I've always assumed it was a piece of British stiff-upper-lip sentiment, but I discovered this week, thanks to Giles Fraser, that it's lifted from Scott Holland's 1910 sermon in St Paul's cathedral after the death of Edward VII. And it takes death seriously: "It is the cruel ambush into which we are snared. It is the pit of destruction. It wrecks, it defeats, it shatters".

Sometimes we feel pressure to make out that death doesn't really exist, that human beings just keep going in another realm under slightly brighter lights and with fewer creases in their clothes. It's good to find that the slightly sickly sentimentality of Henry Scott Holland has some real bottle behind it.