a brass rubbing in our bedroom

Hanging in our bedroom is a large framed brass rubbing that Angela made on our first trip to London, in 2000, in the basement of St. Martin in the Fields church, if I remember correctly. (There was a place in which you could make rubbings from brass engraved plates on black paper with chalk, and Angela chose to do this one.) It shows a man and a woman in Elizabethan dress, with the following text below:

When Oxford gave thee two degrees in art,
And love possest thee master of my heart
Thy colledge fellowshipp thow lefs't for mine
And nought but deathe could seprate me fro thine.
Thirty-fire yeares we livd'e in wedlocke bands
Conioyned in ovr hearts as well as handes
But death the bodies of best friendes devides
And in the earths close wombe their relyckes hides
Yet here they are not lost but sowen, that they
May rise more glorious at the Judgment day.

(Googling shows that the original of this is in the church of St Michael in the village of Bray in Berkshire. It is amazing what one can find out so quickly.)

I always knew the first lines of this to be significant to Angela. (They reminded her of a Billy Bragg song: "Scholarship is the enemy of romance. Where does that leave me? alone in the rain again...") And I thought of that rubbing in connection with those lines and the choice made of love over career. But only recently did I reread the whole inscription and come to the last lines. And those are as significant now to me.

(There are quite a few pictures of this online -- finer versions of the rubbing than Angela made can be bought on e-bay and elsewhere. But of course I like the one she made in spite of some flaws. From one of these sites one can learn that the couple portrayed were John and Mary Rixman. He died at 66, and she erected the brass plate in the church in his memory.)