An epitaph is supposed to be the last word on a life, and "Epitaph" gives us that last word in just five lines. Its subject is a man who lived "so aërially" that only death could finally ground him. The central idea is a joke with a sting in it: the one thing that could make this airy, weightless person come down to earth was being buried in it. The poem's wit lies in the double meaning of that final phrase. "To bring someone down to earth" usually means to correct a dreamer, to puncture his illusions. Here it is literal as well as figurative, because a grave is exactly where the earth is.
The poem sets up this pun with great economy. It begins not with the man but with the place: a spot "sheltered from summer's brazen mirth, / Here by this slender-flowing brook." Both of those adjectives and nouns are doing work. "Brazen" suggests something loud, bright and a little shameless, so summer's cheerfulness feels almost like an intrusion. The resting place is its opposite, cool and shaded, with a brook that flows quietly rather than rushes. We are being prepared for a figure who belongs to quiet, gentle things. Notice, too, that the poem never says whether this shelter is a comfort to the dead man or simply a setting that suits him; it leaves that question open.
Then comes the sentence that carries the weight: "There lies a man who since his birth / Lived so aërially it took / Death to bring him down to earth." The adverb "aërially" is the key word, and Maguire gives it the old-fashioned diaeresis, the two dots over the "e," which tells the reader to pronounce the vowels separately: a-er-i-ally. The word looks airy on the page and sounds airy in the mouth, stretched out into extra syllables as if it were itself floating. Its meaning is double, too. To live aërially could mean being lighthearted and free, or it could mean being impractical, detached, never quite in touch with the ground. The poem declines to say which, and that ambiguity is part of its charm. Is the man being gently teased, or quietly admired?
The construction is tight. The poem is a single five-line stanza rhyming ABABB: "mirth" and "birth," "brook" and "took," with "earth" closing the pattern by echoing "mirth" and "birth." Those three rhymes are linked in sense as well as sound. Mirth, birth and earth trace a whole arc from joy to origin to grave. The rhythm is a steady iambic line of mostly four beats, which gives the verse the dignified, measured quality we expect from an inscription. Yet the sentence spills across the line breaks, so that "it took" hangs at the end of line four before "Death" arrives at the start of line five. That enjambment creates a small pause, a held breath, and then the word "Death" lands heavily at the front of the line, just before the poem sinks to its final syllable, "earth." The rhythm itself seems to descend.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it achieves with so little. It takes a solemn form, the epitaph, and quietly bends it toward wit without losing its respect for the dead. The humor never becomes cruel, partly because of that soft, ambiguous "aërially." We smile, but we also feel the pathos of a person who spent a lifetime above the ground and is only now, at the end, among ordinary things. In five lines, Maguire reminds us that a good epitaph, like a good joke, depends on timing, and that the final word, "earth," is both the punchline and the burial.