Epitaphs usually ask something of the reader: a pause, a prayer, a bit of respect for the dead. Alexander Pope's speaker asks for nothing. He doesn't care where he is buried, who pays for the stone, or what anyone says about him afterwards. The poem is a shrug in verse, and its last line turns that shrug into a quiet statement of faith.
The first four lines are a single sentence, and they keep the reader waiting. We get "marble," "sill," "turf," then an "heir," a "friend in his stead," and finally "any good creature," before the main verb arrives at the start of line five: "Lies one." The delay is part of the joke. The possible monuments run from the grand (marble) to the humble (turf), and the possible mourners from the dutiful (an heir) to the merely kind (any passer-by). The speaker lumps them all together with the offhand "or e'en what they will." Because the dead man is "my head" in line four and "one" in line five, the voice seems to step out of the grave and then slip into the anonymity of the tombstone. The title tells us only that this is a second epitaph on the same subject as an earlier one, so the poem itself is the safest evidence we have.
The sound of the poem supports this casual tone. Pope writes in rhyming couplets, but the lines are loose and bouncing rather than stately. Many of them seem to fall into four main beats with unstressed syllables tumbling between them, as in "Under this MARble, or UNder this SILL." That gives a gallop closer to light verse or conversation than to a solemn inscription. The rhymes are plain and a little comic: "sill" and "will," "stead" and "head." The most striking is "pin" and "within." "Cares not a pin" is homely, almost throwaway, and the couplet then sets it beside "the mortal within," a phrase that makes the body a container the speaker has already moved out of. The grand word "mortal" is placed right next to a pin, and the pin wins.
The key words also repeat in interesting ways. "Still" appears twice, in "still cares not a pin" and "serene still and free." In the first it means "even now," in the second something closer to "always" or "calm." Either way, the dead man's indifference is presented as a continuation of his living character, not a sudden change brought by death. He "ne'er cared," he "still cares not," and he was "living and dying" the same. The pairing "serene" and "free" is the one moment where the language becomes slightly noble, and it describes independence of mind, a freedom from other people's opinion.
There is, of course, a gentle irony in all this. A man who truly did not care what people say about him would hardly bother to compose his own epitaph, and the speaker announces his indifference in a poem designed to be read by others. The humor lies there. The poem pokes fun at the vanity of tombs and eulogies while still using the form of the epitaph, with a little self-awareness about the contradiction.
The final line changes the mood. "Trusts in God, that as well as he was, he shall be" is longer and more weighted than anything before it, and it is surprisingly modest. The speaker does not ask for glory, a throne, or a heavenly reward. He hopes only to be as well in the next life as he was in this one. That makes his confidence sound ordinary and personal, even a little cheerful. The earlier carelessness about the grave now makes sense: if you trust that what matters is safe in God's hands, the marble and the gossip really are beside the point.
The poem is significant because it is so short and does so much. In eight lines it takes a solemn genre, makes it relaxed and witty, and ends on sincere belief without sounding pious. It shows how Pope's couplets could carry conversation as well as polished argument, and it leaves a memorable picture of a man who wants to be remembered, if at all, as someone free of other people's verdicts.