A young man lies asleep in the ground, and the poem's first move is to make the ground kind. His tired head rests "sinu... hospitali", in a welcoming lap, as if the turf were a host receiving a guest. The subtitle says this is a Latin version of the epitaph in Gray's Elegy, so the story is already set. A rustic youth died unknown, fortune never smiled on him, and fame never reached him. Yet he was generous, honest, and pitying, and he was rewarded with a faithful friend. The last two stanzas turn on the reader, telling the curious passer-by to stop prying into his merits or his faults.
The form is the first thing to notice, because Latin does here what English cannot. Each stanza has three long lines and a short closing line, which is the shape of the Sapphic stanza, a classical meter built from the pattern of long and short syllables, with no rhyme. Gray's epitaph runs to three rhymed quatrains, and the Latin stretches it to six stanzas. Rhyme is traded for quantity, and the short last line of each stanza does the work of a closing note. The first stanza ends on "Nescius aurae", unaware of the breeze. "Aura" can mean a breath of air, and it is also the Latin way of saying popular favor. Fame becomes weather that never touched him, and the stanza falls quiet on that thought.
The poem personifies everything around the youth. The Fates are not simply unkind, they do not smile: "nec illi / Fata ridebant". The Muse does not look at him with an arrogant face, and she does not despise a child born among country flocks. Then Sollicitudo, care or anxiety, marks him "suum puerum", her own boy. The possessive and the word "puerum" make this almost tender, as though sorrow had adopted him. Gray's English at this point names Melancholy, and the Latin word is a little harder-edged and more practical, closer to worry than to mood. That small shift gives his sadness a human weight.
The middle stanzas turn on the heart. Truth claims his "pectus" as its own seat, "sedem sibi vindicavit", and he repays the world with the one thing a poor man can give, a tear, "miserto / Corde... lacrimam". In return he receives "fidelis pectus amici", a faithful friend's heart. The exchange is lovely in its smallness. He gives a feeling and gets a feeling back, and neither is money, rank, or praise.
The word "sedes", seat or dwelling, links the middle to the ending. First it is the heart that houses Truth. Then the phrase "sede tremenda", the awesome seat, appears twice in the last two stanzas, and the repetition makes it a threshold. The warning stanza is full of imperatives: "fuge" appears three times, and the "curiosus" reader is told to back away. Meanwhile "virtutes pariterque culpae", virtues and faults alike, wait there "spe tremescentes", trembling with hope. The poem declines to sort the youth's record into credit and debit and hands that judgment to God.
The ending also closes a frame. The poem opens with the earth's lap, "sinu", and ends with "in sui Patris gremio", in the lap of his own Father. The second lap lies behind the first, and the last word, "Deique", puts God in the final position. The unknown boy is held twice, by soil and by God, which is why obscurity does not feel like loss.
The poem is significant for what it shows about translation and about the idea it carries over. Moving an English epitaph into the meter of the ancient lyric poets gives a plain rural grave some of the dignity of a classical monument. It also sharpens the central claim, that a person's worth is measured in sympathy and sincerity rather than in public notice. The humble youth never heard the applause of the crowd. Even in a learned language, the poem insists he did not need it.