Most epitaphs ask us to mourn. Richard Crashaw's short verse for a husband and wife does the opposite: it tells the passing reader to stop crying, and it makes a surprisingly neat argument for why. The grave, it claims, is not an ending for this couple but "the second marriage-bed." Death, usually the great separator, has become the officiant at a second wedding.
The argument begins with a piece of logic that sounds almost legal. Fate can force "a divorce" between soul and body, which is what dying means. But it cannot "sever man and wife, / Because they both lived but one life." If two people share one life, there is nothing for death to cut. The word "divorce" is a clever choice, because it borrows the vocabulary of marriage to describe dying. The idea of marriage then governs the whole poem. It is the kind of witty reasoning a seventeenth-century poet like Crashaw, often grouped with the metaphysical poets, would enjoy, though here the wit serves tenderness rather than showing off.
The sound of the poem changes as the argument turns into comfort. The first six lines move in brisk, steady eight-syllable lines, with couplets that click shut like points in a proof: "wed" with "bed," "force" with "divorce." Then comes the command "Peace, good reader, do not weep," and the lines shorten to a lighter, falling beat that feels like a lullaby. The repeated "Peace" works twice. It tells the reader to be quiet, and it names the calm the dead now enjoy. The same hush runs through "Let them sleep, let them sleep on," where the repetition is itself a soothing, rocking motion.
Crashaw's images are domestic and gentle. Sleep is the central metaphor, and because the grave has already been called a bed, it feels natural rather than a polite excuse for death. The couple are "sweet turtles," meaning turtledoves, birds long associated with faithful love, and they "folded lie," a phrase that suggests both an embrace and the tucked wings of sleeping birds. The most carefully packed line is "In the last knot that love could tie." A knot is what a wedding makes, as in the phrase "tying the knot." It is also the tangle of two bodies lying together, and it is "last" in the sense of final. One small phrase holds marriage, embrace and death.
Then the poem looks beyond the grave. The "stormy night" is the time of waiting, and the "eternal morrow" is the Christian hope of resurrection. The "curtains will be drawn" is a lovely double image. It is the bed-curtains of a bedroom opening at daybreak, and it is also a veil lifting to reveal something greater. The couple do not simply stay asleep; they "wake into a light." Even the final line plays with the poem's central subject: "Whose day shall never die in night." Here the word "die" is used only of a day that refuses to, a quiet reversal of everything the opening lines said about death's power.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in sixteen lines. It follows the convention of speaking to the passer-by, but instead of a stern reminder that we all must die, it offers an argument, a lullaby and a promise. It keeps grief and joy in balance. The tone is calm, but the calm is earned by the reasoning in the first six lines and by the images that follow. We know nothing from the text about who these two people were, and the poem does not need us to. By treating the grave as a bed, death as a wedding guest and the end as a sunrise, Crashaw turns a place of parting into a picture of two people held together, and he makes that picture convincing enough that the reader, told not to weep, might actually be consoled.