An epitaph is a short text honoring a deceased person, most of the time written on a tombstone. From this, we can tell that it would have been after the death of someone that this is written from the lines “It now says, ‘Cease; at length thou hast learnt to grind / Sufficient toll for an unwilling mind’” (1079). Life seems to have told this person that he has done everything he was meant to do on earth and now must leave. That person seemed to have a fulfilling life in that there was nothing else “sought in [Life] much more than thou couldst find” (1079).
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Epitaph
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Joe,
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on having completed the 20 posts required for this course. I wish you had started early enough to have been able to revise your approach, so as not to repeat mistakes, and also so as not to have to face the looming deadline and rush your work. This post really is not effective at analyzing Hardy's poem, in part because you don't even name the poet anywhere in the post. I had to look up the page number in the citation to see what you were writing about.
this is the most depressing thing I have read all summer term! To write a poem about a tombstone or epitaph has to be a poets nightmare. I did like the poem though, don't get me wrong,and the writing style fit the morbidness very well.
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