A grave is usually the one place where everybody is allowed to be praised. Pope's epitaph spends four short lines doing the opposite: it clears a space around a dead poet and tells the great and powerful to stay out of it. The title sets the scene. This is an epitaph for someone who "would not be buried in Westminster Abbey," the place where English monarchs and national celebrities are laid to rest. The poem never names the man, but the voice seems to be his own, speaking from the grave: "let one poor poet sleep."
The central idea is that honour and integrity can pull in opposite directions. The speaker refuses a place among "heroes and kings" and gives his reason in line three: he "never flatter'd folks like you." Poets who wrote for the powerful often paid for their position in praise, and he is proud of not having done so. Then comes the sting of the last line, "Let Horace blush, and Virgil too." Both were Roman poets whose careers were tied to the circle around the emperor Augustus. The speaker does not accuse them outright. He simply invites them to feel ashamed, and the politeness makes the insult sharper.
The form suits the message. The poem is two rhyming couplets (keep/sleep, you/too) in lines of eight syllables with four beats each. Pope is best known for longer, ten-syllable couplets, so the shorter line here feels curt, like an order barked at a crowd or words that must fit on a small piece of stone. The rhythm is a steady, nearly regular iambic one ("In PEACE let ONE poor POET SLEEP"), and its evenness gives the speaker an unruffled calm. He is not shouting, only stating terms.
The imagery is social rather than visual, a matter of who stands where. "Your distance keep" makes us picture barriers, attendants and a crowd being held back, as if rank still mattered after death. The opening exclamation, "Heroes and kings!", sounds like a herald announcing grand visitors. Then, two lines later, those same figures are reduced to "folks." That word is homely and slightly dismissive, the sort of thing you say about ordinary people, and in one syllable it takes the glitter off their titles.
"Poor poet" works on more than one level. It can mean humble, or short of money, or deserving of pity. Judging by the tone, though, the modesty is a pose, and a useful one. The speaker makes himself small so that the great look like the ones who have something to be embarrassed about. "In peace" also echoes the "rest in peace" of gravestones, but here the peace he wants is peace from his noisy neighbours. Fame, the poem suggests, is a kind of crowd, and he would rather sleep alone.
The last line holds the poem's cleverest touch. "Blush" is the body's honest betrayal of shame, so picturing the famous dead going red is both absurd and pointed. The closing "too" sounds like an afterthought, as though the speaker could go on adding names. It also rhymes with "you," which quietly joins the two groups: the kings who are flattered and the poets who flatter them share a rhyme and a guilt.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so little space. It takes a form that normally exists to honour the dead and uses it to turn honour down. It also raises an uncomfortable question about itself. The speaker claims independence, but he does it by measuring himself against Horace and Virgil, and ranking above the two most respected poets of Rome is hardly a modest thing to do. The humility is a weapon, and the epitaph is boasting while it pretends to withdraw. Whether refusing flattery is a pure act or just a subtler form of pride is a question the poem leaves for the reader to answer.