How grand she is enthroned among the dead,
The graves like trophies all about her spread!
Have these not perished as in fable old
With some unfathomed riddle in their hold?
But what the riddle that she now doth ask,
The might of man so fatally to task?
Well may we fancy "What are Life and Death?"
To be the question that has hushed their breath.
Sphinx! Life and Death in thee their type have found,
For so are they in mystic oneness bound;
Fruitful as woman, beautiful as she,
Dread as the lion in his majesty.
The sphinx is a large stone statue close to the cemetery's Bigelow Chapel. It is a memorial to those who fell in the Civil War and was started by Doctor Jacob Bigelow, who was one of the founders of Mt. Auburn Cemetery.
The sculpture has a lion's body, with a human head, a pharoah's headdress, and a necklace with a star. On one side is an inscription which reads:
"American Union Preserved
African Slavery Destroyed
By the Uprising of a Great People
by the Blood of Fallen Heroes."