An autumn evening long ago, rusty hedges lining minor roads, mist in the headlights. The church was down a lane between flat fields, a shuttered barn to one side, wide oak gates ahead. I had persuaded a car full of student friends to take this diversion off the homeward road to Cambridge because of a faint recollection that there was a poem inscribed in the village church at Colmworth in Bedfordshire. We found the one light switch in the unlocked building by the last glimmer of daylight.

The tomb was in a corner of the chancel, shouldered aside by the Victorian altar. A 17th-century stone chest supports life-sized effigies of Sir William Dyer and his wife, Katherine, reclining on their sides with their heads supported on their right hands. He is in armour; she holds a book in her left hand. Columns support a canopy, crested with a scrolling pediment displaying the couple’s coat of arms. On the tomb chest, elegant figures of Faith, Hope and Charity frame two panels with carvings of their four sons and three daughters. The individual elements of the tomb betray Renaissance and Baroque influences, but they are combined in a naive English way which harks back to the Middle Ages, especially the two effigies, stacked one above the other, as if on shelves.

The poem was there all right, on two black stone slabs behind the recumbent figures. But the dim overhead light was blocked by the crested canopy, so the only way to decipher the dusty inscription was to climb on a chair and lean perilously into the tomb, clutching a column for balance, uncomfortably close to the two life-sized marble statues. Seen up close, the verse was not cut into the stone, just painted onto black slate in yellowed oil paint, making its survival seem all the more extraordinary. As I read and transcribed, I became convinced that this was a poem of real beauty.

I found out a little more about the family commemorated by this tomb. It was erected by the author of the fine verse inscribed on it, Katherine D’Oyley Dyer, who was born in about 1585, and who married Sir William Dyer in 1602, when they were both in their late teens. Sir William died in 1621 and she never remarried. The monument was erected in 1641, during the Civil War. In the will made not long before her death in 1654, Katherine lamented that ‘her losses had become very great since those late troubles’. I have only been able to find one other verse attributed to her, which is inscribed on the tomb of her D’Oyley relations in St Mary’s Church,
Hambleden, Buckinghamshire. While not of the exceptional quality of the verse at Colmworth, it is elegant and assured, flowering at one moment into a lovely Baroque image of the tears of mourners being like pearls brought as offerings to adorn the monument. I have never found any other verse by Lady Dyer, but William Dyer’s father was known to the Sidneys of Penshurst, and indeed related to them by marriage, so there is a slender thread of connection between Lady Dyer and that family of eminent women poets.

The two panels at Colmworth divide the verse into two stanzas. The first takes the form of public speech in assured couplets and has an elegantly shifting caesura of the kind common in the court poetry of the 1620s (I have modernised spelling and punctuation):

If a large heart joined with a noble mind
Showing true worth, unto all good inclin’d,
If faith in friendship, justice unto all,
Leave such a memory as we may call
Happy, thine is. Then pious marble keep
His just fame waking, though his lov’d dost sleep.
And though Death can devour all that has breath,
And monuments themselves have had a death,
Nature shan’t suffer this to ruinate,
Nor time demolish’t, nor an envious fate.
Raised by a just hand, not vainglorious pride,
Who’d be concealed, were’t modesty to hide,
Such an affection did so long survive
The object of’t, yet loved it as alive.
And this great blessing to his name doth give,
To make it by his tomb and issue live.

This is handsome, stately verse, but the words painted onto the second slab are astonishing: urgent, private, affectionate, expressed in irregular lines. They end with evening and dewfall, as Katherine D’Oyley Dyer anticipates her own death, and the marriage bed and the columned tomb become one.

My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day
Afford thy drowsy patience leave to stay
One hour longer, so that we might either
Sit up, or go to bed together?
But since thy finished labour has possessed
Thy weary limbs with early rest,
Enjoy it sweetly; and thy widow bride
Shall soon repose her by thy slumbering side,
Whose business now is only to prepare
My nightly dress, and call to prayer.
Mine eyes wax heavy and the day grows old,
The dew falls thick, my blood grows cold;
Draw, draw, the closed curtains and make room,
My dear, my dearest dust, I come, I come.

I am haunted still by those closing lines, by Katherine D’Oyley Dyer’s image of the end of life as a cold evening coming down on an England at war with itself. They will always be bound to my memory of the rediscovery of her verses – of the empty church at nightfall and the mist over the flat fields – so many years ago.