An Epitaph — Summary

In Countee Cullen’s “An Epitaph,” a man leans across a golden table in the afterlife and directly questions God about death. The language is blunt: the “standard label / All flesh bears: Made to die” makes mortality sound almost bureaucratic, as if every human body comes stamped with the same grim fact. But the man’s eye is still puzzled, not angry or resigned. The poem’s quiet power comes at the end, when he asks whether God can reassure “her” why. That single word shifts the poem from cosmic argument to personal grief—he is not only asking for himself, but for someone he loves. The mood is calm, intimate, and unresolved, like a question asked in a beautiful room that no answer can settle.