Eight lines are enough for Alexander Pope to stage a deathbed. Two voices speak. "She" calls the other speaker "dear father", and the poem implies that she is already dead. He addresses her as "Dear shade" and "spotless ghost", and she speaks of being "dust". Since the title tells us the bishop died in exile in Paris in 1732, we can guess that the father is Atterbury himself, speaking his last words. The poem shows two loves, one for a daughter and one for a country, and then lets the second one win.
The daughter's opening is gentle and a little brisk: "Yes, we have lived--one pang, and then we part!" Death is reduced to a single "pang", and she turns at once to comfort. She hopes "Heaven, dear father! now have all thy heart." That wish is the hinge of the poem. She wants his attachments to the world released, and she asks only that he remember their love "Till you are dust like me." His reply, "Dear shade! I will", seems to promise exactly that. He imagines their dust mixing in one grave and calls her "more than fortune, friends, or country lost". The list of losses is quietly devastating. Wealth, companions and homeland all count for something, and she outweighs them.
Then comes the question that sets up the surprise: "Is there on earth one care, one wish beside?" The rhetoric invites the answer *no*. Grief has stripped him down to one love, and any reader expects him to say so. Instead he answers "Yes--Save my country, Heaven!" The dash is a sharp turn, as though the thought forces its way out. The word "Heaven" is also doing something clever. The daughter hoped Heaven would have "all thy heart", but he uses the word as the address for a petition about earthly politics. His heart, then, is not entirely given up. Some of it stays with the country he can no longer stand on. The word "country" appears twice, first as something lost and then as something he prays to save, so the second use answers the first. The pain of exile gives the line its force: a man separated from his homeland spends his last breath on its welfare rather than his own soul.
The form supports this. The poem is written in heroic couplets, iambic pentameter rhymed in pairs (part/heart, still/will, ghost/lost, beside/died), the tidy form Pope handled so well. But Pope breaks two of the lines between the speakers. "Till you are dust like me" is completed by "Dear shade! I will", and "Yes--Save my country, Heaven!" is completed by "He said, and died." The effect is of two people finishing each other's verse, which suits a daughter and father so close. The second split also lets the final four syllables fall with great bluntness. After the exclamations, the dashes and the long sentence of the father's lament, "He said, and died" is plain narration made of one-syllable words. The poem stops mid-flow, and the abruptness reads as death itself. It also makes the rhyme *beside/died* final, since the "one wish beside" is the last thing he says.
The imagery is spare but it repeats. "Dust" appears twice, once in her mouth and once in his, and the repetition shows him taking up her word and agreeing to share her fate. "Shade" and "ghost" belong to the same world of the grave, and "spotless" gives her a purity that justifies placing her above fortune and friends. There is hardly any decoration beyond this. The grief is conveyed through broken speech and exclamations rather than elaborate metaphors.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little space. An epitaph normally praises someone in fixed, public words on a stone. Pope instead dramatizes a life's ending as a conversation and lets the dead man's own priorities become his monument. The conflict between private love and public duty is left open, and nobody tells us which is nobler. We only see that when the father has to choose his last words, he chooses the country. Readers can admire that or find it painful, and the poem lets both responses stand.