Eight lines are all Pope allows himself here, and he saves the sharpest thing for the last two. On the surface this is a tribute to Rowe, whose remains are being laid in Westminster Abbey. Underneath it is an accusation. The poem is really about two dead men and the gap between them: Rowe, who is given a fair urn, and Dryden, who lies close by "beneath a rude and nameless stone."
The opening couplet sounds like a ceremony. "Thy relics, Rowe, to this fair urn we trust" has the hush of a funeral, with its direct address to the dead man and its solemn verb "trust," as if the body were being handed over for safekeeping. But the second line already shifts the focus. Rowe's resting place is "sacred" because it stands "by Dryden's awful dust." "Awful" here carries its older sense of inspiring awe, so the grandest word in the opening belongs to Dryden, not to the man being buried. The same goes for "rude," which in Pope's day meant rough and unfinished. Set beside "fair," it makes the contrast between the two memorials plain without a word of open complaint.
The third and fourth lines contain the poem's neatest irony: Dryden's bare stone is something "to which thy tomb shall guide inquiring eyes." Rowe's monument is a signpost, and what it points to is the neglected grave. The compliment to Rowe quietly turns into an embarrassment for everyone responsible for the plainness beside him.
The middle couplet seems to relax into conventional mourning. "Peace to thy gentle shade, and endless rest!" is the classical language of elegy, with its "shade" and its blessing. Then comes the line that crowds itself: "Blest in thy genius, in thy love, too, blest!" The repeated "blest" brackets the line, and the little "too" wedged in the middle makes it feel almost overfull, as though the speaker cannot stop listing the dead man's good fortune. The "love" is not explained here. Read against the final couplet, though, it seems to prepare for the woman who appears there, so the line is more than filler.
Her arrival gives the poem its point: "One grateful woman to thy fame supplies / What a whole thankless land to his denies." Everything in the couplet is built on opposition. "One" faces "whole," "grateful" faces "thankless," and the rhyme itself, "supplies" and "denies," sets giving and withholding against each other at the line endings. The ordinary form of an epitaph is a eulogy, but this couplet reads like a verdict. One person's private gratitude has done what a nation's public gratitude has not. The word "land" widens the charge from a few negligent officials to the whole country. Because the poem says "his," pointing back to Dryden without naming him, the shame comes at the very end almost as an afterthought, which makes it hit harder.
The form helps this along. The poem is written in heroic couplets, rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter: trust/dust, lies/eyes, rest/blest, supplies/denies. Each pair feels like a small closed statement, and the lines are mostly end-stopped, so the poem moves in steady, measured steps, like a procession. The rhythm is not rigid, though. "Peace to thy gentle shade" begins by leaning hard on the first word, which gives the blessing real weight, and the spare, balanced lines suit the carved-in-stone setting that an epitaph implies. The title tells us the verses were "intended" for Rowe's monument, and the compression fits that purpose. Every word has to earn its place in marble.
What makes the poem significant is how much argument it packs into so little space. Pope uses a form meant for praise to criticise a society's habits of remembering, and he does it with politeness, balance and a single devastating contrast. The poem honours two writers at once, and it reminds us that fame, like a tomb, depends on someone being willing to pay for it.