The speaker, a dead man named Cassius Hueffer, complains from the grave about the flattering words chiseled on his tombstone. The inscription claims he was gentle and balanced, a model human being, but Cassius calls it empty rhetoric. People who actually knew him, he says, smile at the lie. He imagines a truer epitaph: life was harsh to him, and his conflicted nature drove him to fight against life until it killed him. He adds that he couldn’t defend himself against gossip while alive, and now he’s stuck with a fool’s version of who he was. The tone is bitter and sardonic. There is a grim comedy in hearing a corpse resent his own memorial. The mood is one of wounded pride and alienation, as if death still hasn’t ended the argument between who he was and how the world remembers him.
Cassius Hueffer — Summary
They have chiseled on my stone the words: “His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him That nature might stand up and say to all the world, This was a man.” Those who knew me smile As they read this empty rhetoric. My epitaph should have been: “Life was not gentle to him, And the elements so mixed in him That he made warfare on life In the which he was slain.” While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues, Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph Graven by a fool!