A poem labelled "Sacred to the Memory" should be a graveside tribute, but Burns's ode is closer to a trial with the verdict already decided. The speaker addresses the Devil himself, "Dweller in yon dungeon dark", and tells him to look at the woman now approaching his kingdom. She is a rich widow whose money has been her whole life. The central idea arrives in the final stanza: wealth is "Omnipotent" only "here", on earth. It cannot buy a place beyond the grave, while the "cave-lodged Beggar" with "a conscience clear" walks straight into Heaven.
The opening stanza sets the tone with a cruel twist on an image. The Devil is "Hangman of creation", yet the woman is the one "noosing with care a bursting purse". She ties up her money like a condemned man, and the purse is "baited with many a deadly curse", like a trap. Burns writes this in short, hammering lines (DWEL-ler in yon DUN-geon DARK) with clipped rhymes: dark and mark, appears and years, purse and curse. The effect is something like spitting out the words. Even the phrase "widow-weeds" is double-edged. It names the black clothes of mourning, but "weeds" also suggests something that chokes.
The Strophe turns to a close-up of the "wither'd Beldam's face". Burns's best touch here is the eye: it overflows, but only with "rheum", the watery discharge of old age, since "Pity's flood there never rose". Her hands "took, but never gave", a plain antithesis that sums up her life. The section opens and closes on triple rhymes (face, trace, grace and chest, unblest, rest), and the final line stretches out to its full length: "She goes, but not to realms of everlasting rest!" That last word is the sting. "Rest" is the comfort offered at every funeral, and here it is denied.
The Antistrophe adds drama, and some dark comedy. A bracketed order, "(A while forbear, ye torturing fiends;)", pauses hell's machinery to make way for her. She walks "unwilling" and "tardy", dragging her feet like a debtor on the way to court. Burns is careful to say she is "No fallen angel, hurl'd from upper skies". She has no tragic grandeur. She is the Devil's "trusty quondam Mate", and the Latin "quondam" gives her a faintly legal air, as if hell were a firm and she a former business partner returning to the office.
The Epode shifts from mockery to argument. "Ten thousand glittering pounds a-year" is a question mark hanging over the whole life: "are they of no more avail?" The word "Omnipotent" is the sharpest, since it gives money the power that belongs to God. Then comes the contrast of the funeral itself. The "pompous bier" is all show, while the "wretched Vital Part" (the soul) is "driven" downwards, and the rhyme of "driven" with "Heaven" puts the two destinations side by side. The beggar's rhymes are quiet and direct: "clear" answers "bier", and the last line is plain and almost flat, "Expires in rags, unknown, and goes to Heaven." After so much noise and spite, its calm lands hard.
The form is part of the joke. Strophe, antistrophe and epode are the names of the parts of a Pindaric ode, a lofty classical form built for praise. Burns borrows that ceremonial structure and uses it to condemn, so the grandeur of the form mimics the grandeur of the funeral he is mocking. The lines vary in length and the rhymes surprise, which suits a poem that is shouting rather than singing.
The poem matters because it shows Burns's moral instinct at its sharpest. He judges people by what they give, not what they own. This is the same instinct as in "A Man's a Man for A' That", which also refuses to let rank and money stand in for worth. The ode is also uncomfortable, and that deserves honest comment. It attacks a named woman after her death with a hag-like caricature, "Beldam", and gives her no defence, so readers may feel its anger is one-sided. Still, its lasting force comes from the idea underneath the insults, that a funeral can honour a coffin but cannot change a verdict.