Death and the three poets who shaped The Smiths’ song ‘Cemetry Gates’
Music fans can always count on The Smiths to bring the mood down; perhaps even one of their most upbeat songs, ‘Cemetry Gates’, still deals with death. Written in 1986, the track is a cheerful little romp about graveyards.
“A dreaded sunny day / So let’s go where we’re happy / And I meet you at the cemetry gates,” Morrissey sings as a central lyric of the track. Harking back to a youth spent wandering around Manchester’s Southern Cemetery in his spare time, the singer imagines looking at the graves of people he loves, hates and admires as he contemplates the cruelty of death.
Morrissey has always been obsessed with mortality. “I have a dramatic, unswayable, unavoidable obsession with death,” he told Spin in 1988, discussing his fixation on tragic figures like James Dean, who died in a fatal car crash at age 24, or Oscar Wilde’s fall from literary fame into destitution by his death at age 46. Morrissey adds cheerily, “If there was a magical, beautiful pill that would retire you from this world, I think I would take it.”
But throughout the track, the songwriter appears to be primarily interested not in the act of death but in the things people leave behind. In particular, Morrissey considers three classic poets and their immortal words. John Keats, William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde haunt the track as three of his biggest influences, shaping the singer into the wordsmith he was.
“Keats and Yeats are on your side,” Morrissey sings. John Keats was an English poet who led the Romantic movement. However, romantic doesn’t mean what might be expected; it wasn’t all roses and kisses. Instead, the movement was clearly one of flouncy wording and sonnets.
Keats, similar to The Smiths’ leader, was obsessed with death. After losing his family very young, many of his works contemplate the topic, but none more so than ‘When I Have Fears’, in which the writer fears death will come before he’s finished his work. The opening lines, “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,” could well be a Smiths lyric.
Next up, Morrissey cites W.B Yeats, an Irish poet who dealt with death and conflict a lot. The poet wrote bluntly about mankind’s evil and the darkness in all humans as he said, “Man has created death”. Harking a line of reference to the famous Smiths lyrics from ‘Ask’ where Morrissey announced, “If it’s not love then it’s the bomb that will bring us together”, considering man-made weaponry as the only unifying force we have left.
But no one poet and writer feels as singularly influential to Morrissey as Oscar Wilde. In the song, the singer sides with Wilde and his all-together more celebratory view of death. In The Canterville Ghost, Wilde writes, “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence,” seeming to share the kind of morbid mindset that Morrissey himself once had.
The entirety of ‘Cemetry Gates’ deals with the immortality of the written word versus the stark mortality of humans. “If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own,” Morrissey sings, calling out a plagiariser while spending the entire song plagiarising classic works. Beyond these three clear literary callouts, throughout the lyrics, Morrissey steals lines from Shakespeare and 1940s Hollywood films in a mass act of literary borrowing and morbid contemplation.
However, despite his obsession with literature, Morrissey still didn’t manage to spell cemetery right.
