Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk is a work by Sir Thomas Browne, published in 1658 as the first part of a two-part work that concludes with The Garden of Cyrus.
The title is Greek for "urn burial": A hydria (ὑδρία) is a large Greek pot, and taphos (τάφος) means "tomb".
Its nominal subject was the discovery of some 40 to 50 Anglo-Saxon pots in Norfolk.[1] The discovery of these remains prompts Browne to deliver, first, a description of the antiquities found, and then a survey of most of the burial and funerary customs, ancient and current, of which his era was aware.
The most famous part of the work is the apotheosis of the fifth chapter, where Browne declaims:
George Saintsbury, in the Cambridge History of English Literature (1911), calls the totality of Chapter V "the longest piece, perhaps, of absolutely sublime rhetoric to be found in the prose literature of the world."
Urn Burial has been admired by Charles Lamb, Samuel Johnson, John Cowper Powys, James Joyce, and Herman Melville, while Ralph Waldo Emerson said that it "smells in every word of the sepulchre".
Browne's text is discussed in W. G. Sebald's novel The Rings of Saturn.
The English composer William Alwyn wrote his Symphony No. 5, subtitled Hydriotaphia, in homage to Browne's imagery and rhythmic prose.
The American composer Douglas J. Cuomo's The Fate of His Ashes: Requiem for Victims of Power for chorus and organ takes its text from Urn Burial.
Eric Ambler excerpts a passage from chapter 5 ("But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy...") as the epigram for the novel The Mask of Dimitrios.
Derek Walcott uses an excerpt as the epigraph to his poem "Ruins of a Great House", while Edgar Allan Poe quotes the Urn Burial in the epigraph of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".
Kevin Powers uses an excerpt from the fifth chapter ("To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetfull of evils past...") as one of the epigraphs for his novel "The Yellow Birds".
Alain de Botton references the work in his book Status Anxiety.
Borges refers to it in the final line of his short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".
It also appears in the novel Sanshirō, written by Natsume Sōseki; Hirota-sensei lent the book to Sanshirō.
American nonfiction writer Colin Dickey compares some of Browne's writing on death in Urn Burial to the fate of Browne's skull in his book Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius.