Literary notes about Sepulcher (AI summary)
The word sepulcher is employed in literature in both its literal sense as a tomb and a metaphorical sense to evoke decay, concealment, or even hypocrisy. In religious narratives it often functions as a sacred locus intertwined with themes of resurrection and divine destiny, as when it signifies the Holy Sepulcher in accounts of crusades or biblical events [1, 2, 3]. Conversely, authors sometimes deploy the term to criticize institutions or bodies politic, portraying them as hollow and corrupt edifices—literal and figurative graves of beauty and authenticity—aptly described as a “whited sepulcher” [4, 5, 6]. This dual usage lends the term a potent symbolic versatility, bridging the realms of the spiritual and the secular, the solemn and the satirical [7, 8, 9].
- Whatever the fate be, still I fare To fight for the Holy Sepulcher.
— from Toward the Gulf by Edgar Lee Masters - “And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulcher?
— from A Handbook of Freethought Containing in Condensed and Systematized Form a Vast Amount of Evidence Against the Superstitious Doctrines of Christianity - He came forth from His sepulcher with the same body that was laid in the grave.
— from Lessons in the Small Catechism of Dr. Martin LutherFor the Senior Department of Lutheran Sunday-Schools and for General Use by George Mezger - The theater, in common with most modern art, is a whitened sepulcher, rotten to the core, affected, aristocratic, anti-democratic.
— from The Fourteenth of July, and Danton: Two Plays of the French Revolution by Romain Rolland - "It's a whited sepulcher, that's what it is.
— from The Witness by Grace Livingston Hill - Royalty was a somber abstraction, a menacing mystery of which men were weary, a whited sepulcher, fair without, but full of rottenness.
— from The Countess of Charny; or, The Execution of King Louis XVI by Alexandre Dumas - "There I will make my sepulcher," was his expression in the letter in which he announced his intention to his brother.
— from By Pike and Dyke: a Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic by G. A. (George Alfred) Henty - To her the whole world seemed like an open sepulcher.
— from The Woman with a Stone HeartA Romance of the Philippine War by O. W. (Oscar William) Coursey - As for the world, it is a sepulcher and nothing else.”
— from The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet
