An epitaph is an odd kind of poem, because it is written for strangers. It waits in a church for whoever happens to wander past, and Pope's lines for Simon Harcourt, the Lord Chancellor's only son, begin by catching that stranger by the sleeve: "To this sad shrine, whoe'er thou art, draw near." The heading places the poem in the church of Stanton Harcourt, in Oxfordshire, in 1720. The words are shaped for a monument: short, balanced, made to be read slowly. Yet what starts as a public notice becomes something far more personal halfway through, a poet admitting that he cannot do the job he has been given.
The first four lines are praise, packed into two rhymed couplets of ten-syllable lines. The portrait rests on two roles, "the friend most loved, the son most dear," a line that balances so evenly around its comma that friend and son seem to weigh exactly the same. Then Pope makes his boldest claim with two "but" clauses. Harcourt "ne'er knew joy, but friendship might divide," which suggests a man who could not enjoy anything without splitting it with someone else. He also "gave his father grief but when he died." Here "but" means "except," and the exception is enormous. A whole life without a moment of pain for his father is cancelled by one event, and the line ends on the blunt, single syllable "died." The rhyme matters too. "Divide" and "died" are tied together by sound, so the warmth of shared joy sits right beside the thing that ends it.
After this the poem turns. The stranger drops out, and Pope speaks to the dead man himself ("thy stone"). Before that comes the exclamation "How vain is reason, eloquence how weak!" For a poet whose medium is reasoned argument in polished couplets, this is a striking confession. The line is also a small joke against itself. Its words arrive in a mirrored order, "how vain… reason" answered by "eloquence how weak," so the sentence is elegantly eloquent about eloquence failing. The neatness of the verse quietly argues with what it says, as if Pope were testing whether art can hold this much grief and finding it can only just manage.
"If Pope must tell what Harcourt cannot speak" is the oddest line. Pope names himself in the third person, as though his name were already carved beside the dead man's. Epitaphs often let the grave speak for itself, but here the fact is silence, and the friend has to supply the voice. The word "must" sounds like duty and reluctance at once.
The closing couplet is a plea: "Oh, let thy once-loved friend inscribe thy stone, / And, with a father's sorrows, mix his own!" The phrase "once-loved" is poignant. Judging by the wording, it suggests that the two-way exchange of friendship has been broken, and the love now has nowhere to go but into the inscription. The verb "mix" answers "divide" from the third line. Joy was once shared out between friends, and now sorrow is blended with the father's. The word "father" also closes both quatrains, which holds the poem together around the person whose loss is greatest. Pope lets the poem end on "his own," yet he puts his grief second, after the father's, a quiet piece of modesty.
The poem is significant for how much it does in eight lines. It follows the old public purpose of an epitaph, honouring the dead for strangers, but it makes room for private feeling inside that formal frame. It also contains a paradox that rewards a second look. The poem says words are inadequate, yet the poem is the inscription, and the admission of failure becomes the most believable tribute it could give. A louder, longer set of compliments would have sounded less true than a poet who steps forward, names himself, and says that this is hard.