An epitaph — the short inscription on a tombstone — normally names and praises admirable qualities of the person buried there, and then hopes for a benevolent future after death. The gravestone may speak to the viewer in the dead person’s voice (as Coleridge imitates the Latin Siste, viator: “Stop, Christian passer-by, stop, child of God! / O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.”) or it may speak as a mourner addressing the buried person (as in the Latin, Sit terra tibi levis, “May the earth lie light upon you”). In his Essay on Epitaphs, written a few years after William Cowper’s birth, Dr. Johnson restricts epitaphs to “heroes and wise men” deserving of praise: “We find no people acquainted with the use of letters that omitted to grace the tombs of their heroes and wise men with panegyrical inscriptions.” The readers of “Epitaph on a Hare” by William Cowper (pronounced “Cooper”) would have expected just those qualities in any epitaph: it would celebrate a male either wise or heroic, and its praise would be public and formal. (The Greek roots of “panegyric” mean “an assembly of all the people”.) Against such prescriptive forms, the only obligation for an ambitious poet writing an epitaph is to be original. The form becomes memorable by dispensing with or altering conventional moves: Yeats brusquely repudiates Coleridge’s Christian “Stop, passer-by,” in his own succinct self-epitaph: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” Keats, dying in his twenties, refused the first, indispensable element of an epitaph, a name, and wanted only “Here lies one whose name is writ in water.” As soon as animals became domestic pets, they could become the subject of an epitaph; Byron wrote a long epitaph on his dog, and had it inscribed on a large tombstone. (On the grounds of at least one of the colleges at Cambridge, there is a cemetery for pets of the dons which includes inscribed tombstones and small sculptured monuments.) Nowadays, in a practice that would have scandalized the pious of past eras, newspaper death notices in the United States commonly include, among the named survivors, domestic pets. The subject of Cowper’s epitaph is not domesticated, but wild — “a wild Jack hare” — not a hero, not a human being, hardly even a pet, but one nonetheless named and distinguished from its fellow hares. The most original epitaph for a pet in English literature, Cowper’s “Epitaph on a Hare” is a poem utterly dependent on charm. Poets writing on death have traditionally preferred to create either a somber “philosophical” meditation (on time, regret, the afterlife, and so on) or a direct expression of personal grief. By contrast, charm in lyric requires a complex management of tone: it cannot be single-mindedly earnest nor single-mindedly sorrowful, nor can it be unconscious of its hearers. It is a social utterance. It needs a stylized attitude of wistfulness and irony, a blending of the impersonal with the personal, of the independent mind with the troubled heart, and above all, it requires an evident awareness of itself and its listeners. In real life, charm is almost as rare as exceptional beauty: beauty is Fate’s gift, but charm is a quality of personality and behavior. And charm is always remarked with a lightness of tone; it concerns something small, not sublime or heroic. The praise of charm is always tinged with pathos, charm being such a transient quality. Yeats, reflecting in “Memory” on the women he had loved (if imperfectly) over a long life, comments on the relative rarity of loveliness and charm among those women: “One had a lovely face / And two or three had charm.” But neither loveliness nor charm could transfix him for life, as had the wild beauty of Maud Gonne’s presence: One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain, Because the mountain grass Cannot forget the form Where the mountain hare has lain. That his love for Gonne was a quality of the flesh is stipulated by Yeats’s finishing this little poem with an unignorable match of
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