Four lines, one dash and a whole philosophy of living: Stevenson's quatrain has no patience for gentle persuasion. It opens with a shout, "AWAY with funeral music", and the capitals turn the first word into a wave of the hand that sweeps the mourners and their dirges off the stage. What replaces them is not silence but a different sound: "set / The pipe to powerful lips." The poem is about how to face death, and its answer is to turn life up rather than down. Its central idea arrives in the closing lines as a neat proverb: "The cup of life's for him that drinks / And not for him that sips."
The sounds of the words do much of the arguing. "Funeral music" is made of soft, humming consonants, f, n, m, and it droops like the thing it names. The pipe line is quite different. "Pipe," "powerful" and "lips" are packed with p sounds, which you cannot say aloud without pushing out little puffs of breath, so the line seems to be playing the instrument as you read it. The dash after "set" works like the breath taken before the first note.
That breath points to the poem's quiet pattern of imagery. Pipe, lips, cup, drinks, sips: everything happens at the mouth, where breath goes out and drink goes in. Both are signs of being alive, and a dead mouth does neither. The poem never states this, but its images keep returning to the body's most basic ways of taking part in life.
The form is just as compact. The lines alternate between eight and six syllables, in a steady iambic beat, the pattern of the ballad stanza that hymns and folk songs have made familiar. (Reading "funeral" and "powerful" as two syllables each makes the count work.) That familiarity gives the stanza the ring of a toast or a saying. Only the second and fourth lines rhyme, "lips" with "sips", while "set" and "drinks" go unmatched. Because the rhyme falls on the shorter lines, the stanza clicks shut on its last word.
That rhyme is the cleverest move in the poem. The same lips that blow the pipe are the lips that sip, so what separates the drinker from the sipper is not equipment but nerve. "Sips" is also a thin, hissing, timid little word, and the poem ends on it, as though the stanza were shrinking away from the very habit it dismisses. The last line itself is a shorter, hurried "And not for him...", and the balanced "for him that drinks / And not for him that sips" has the weighed-up feel of a proverb, helped by the old-fashioned "him that" construction.
The poem leaves some things open. It does not say whose funeral is being waved away. It could be a general protest against gloom, or, judging by the tone, a wish that death be met with something livelier than mourning. Either way, death is not denied: "funeral music" is named so that it can be sent off. The poem seems to say that a gloomy tribute is the wrong one, not that grief has no place.
Its significance lies in how much it packs into so little room. "The cup of life" is a familiar image, but Stevenson turns it into a question of appetite, and cautious, measured living comes to look like a kind of loss. There is some irony in a poem about drinking deep that takes only four lines, a single gulp. Readers who know Stevenson as the author of *Treasure Island* may recognise the same zest, though four lines can hardly prove a pattern. What they do offer is a challenge that a reader can carry away: when the pipe is offered, do you take it?