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”.)
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