An epitaph is supposed to look backward, but Alexander Pope's lines for General Henry Withers spend their last third looking at the living. The title places the epitaph in Westminster Abbey and gives the year 1729. The poem itself offers no battles, dates or anecdotes. Instead it builds a portrait from qualities alone, and then turns that portrait into a challenge to its readers.
The first eight lines are pure tribute, and their central trick is balance. Withers is "bravest" and "gentlest" in the same breath, and the pairing sets the pattern. He is "born to arms" yet endowed with "soft humanity"; his worth was "approved" in youth and his goodness "beloved" in age. Soldier and gentleman, young and old, are held in a single frame. Even the praise of his patriotism carries a gentle correction: "Thy country's friend, but more of human kind." The word "but" ranks his loyalties, placing humanity above nation, and it makes the compliment bigger than the usual soldier's eulogy.
The mourners are chosen with care. "The hardy veteran" and "the gay courtier" are about as far apart as two social types can be, one weathered by campaigns, the other polished by court life. Pope gets them both to grieve, but the courtier's grief gets a quiet qualification: he "feels the sigh sincere." The word "sincere" only needs stressing if sincerity is rare, so a small jab at courtly insincerity slips in even while the general is being honoured.
At line seven the poem swerves. "Withers, adieu!" sounds like a final farewell, but the sentence continues: "yet not with thee remove / Thy martial spirit, or thy social love!" Now the dead man is asked to leave something behind. The pairing of "martial" and "social" repeats the earlier balance of courage and kindness, but they have become public property, virtues the nation should inherit rather than ones a single man possessed. From here the speaker's tone hardens. "Amidst corruption, luxury, and rage" is a rolling list of three vices, and the poem judges "our age" by what it lacks. Judging by the language, the sins are moral softness, self-indulgence and violent faction. The phrase "ancient virtues" sets the past against a present in decline.
The final couplet is the most inventive. "Nor let us say (those English glories gone) / The last true Briton lies beneath this stone." Grammatically it is a refusal, a hope that we will not say something. But the sentence has to be spoken to be rejected, so the claim that Withers was the last true Briton lingers in the reader's mind. It is the highest praise the poem can give, delivered as a warning. The parenthesis also works well, because the bracketed "those English glories gone" is the despairing thought the speaker is trying to keep half-hidden. The line ends heavily on "stone," a short, hard word that suggests both the monument and the finality of the grave.
Formally, the poem is a model of control. It is twelve lines of iambic pentameter in six rhyming couplets, the heroic couplet that Pope handled so skilfully. Most couplets close the thought neatly, as in "mind/kind" or "tear/sincere," and that gives the verse the settled authority of an inscription. The exclamations ("Oh, born to arms! oh, worth in youth approved!") bring in a note of feeling, and the repeated "Oh" lets the lines almost sound like a voice breaking. Beneath that emotion, though, the syntax is orderly and the antitheses are exact.
The poem is worth reading because it makes a short memorial do two jobs at once. It honours one man, and it also uses him as a standard against which a whole age can be measured. Its closing question, whether such virtue can survive the person who held it, is what keeps it from being a polite formula of mourning.