Dryden's elegy for Oldham does something unusual for a poem of mourning: it says goodbye while still criticising the dead man's work. Its opening line holds the tension. "Too little and too lately known" tells us the friendship, or at least the kinship, came late and was cut short. The next line is oddly possessive: Oldham is someone "I began to think and call my own." Dryden is not claiming a close personal friend. He is claiming a fellow spirit, and he explains the claim in terms of craft. Their souls were "cast in the same poetic mould," a metalworker's image that makes the two men seem stamped from one pattern. They struck "one common note" on their lyres and both hated "knaves and fools," so the kinship is one of satirical temper.
The poem's central idea is that Oldham's early death robbed English poetry of a talent that was brilliant but unfinished. Dryden develops this through two linked image-systems, racing and ripening. The race comes first, with the lines "To the same goal did both our studies drive; / The last set out the soonest did arrive." Then Dryden brings in Nisus, the runner from Virgil's story who slips in the race while his young friend goes on to win it. Dryden casts himself as the one who stumbled and Oldham as the winner. The comparison flatters the younger man, but it also carries a chill. In this race, reaching the goal first means dying first.
The ripening imagery takes over in the middle. "O early ripe!" Dryden exclaims, and Oldham's "abundant store" and "generous fruits" follow. Here the praise turns critical. What age might have added, Dryden says, is a command of "numbers," meaning metre and smoothness, which "Nature never gives the young." He admits that wit shines "through the harsh cadence of a rugged line." Calling the roughness "a noble error" caused by "too much force" is kind, but it is still an error. The sentence that follows is a surprise. Time, Dryden says, "but mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme." Smoothness is a gain, but he calls it "dull," and he seems to be turning the point against his own polished style. Oldham's rawness had a "quickness" (liveliness) that maturity might have sweetened and deadened at once.
The form helps here. The poem is written in rhyming iambic pentameter couplets, and Dryden writes them with a conversational ease, so the sentences push against the line ends. That passage on "rhyme" breaks the pattern: *prime*, *time* and *rhyme* make a triplet, and the last line stretches out to twelve syllables. The longer line seems to slow down and mellow, enacting the very process it describes. The rhyme words also echo each other across the poem. "Young" rhymes with "tongue" twice, once in the middle ("what Nature never gives the young... native tongue") and again near the end ("thou young, / ... Marcellus of our tongue"). The repetition ties Oldham's youth to the language he wrote in, so his loss becomes a loss for English poetry.
That second appearance comes with another classical comparison. Marcellus, in Virgil, is the promising young Roman whose early death is lamented. Calling Oldham "Marcellus of our tongue" gives him that tragic status. The farewell itself, "hail and farewell," echoes the old Latin formula of parting, which gives the poem a solemn, almost ceremonial tone.
The ending is the most beautiful part of the poem. The last couplet sets Oldham's honours against his fate: "Thy brows with ivy and with laurels bound; / But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around." Ivy and laurel are the plants of poetic reward, and the sentence begins by crowning him. The "But" then reverses the image, and the rhyme of "bound" with "around" turns the garland into a circle of darkness. Dryden does not console us. He lets the poem close on night.
The elegy matters because it shows a way of mourning a fellow writer without false sweetness. Dryden praises, regrets and judges at once, and the judgment makes the praise more convincing. His grief is controlled, and it reads as respect for a talent that he thinks deserved more time.