SOURCE: "Matthew Prior's 'An Epitaph'," in The Explicator, Vol. 51, No. 2, Winter, 1993, pp. 84-9.

[In the following essay, Thorson offers a close analysis of "An Epitaph."]

Stet quicunque volet potensAulae culmine lubrico, &c. Senec.

[The epigraph: "Let who will stand firm upon the slippery pinnacle of princely power." Seneca, Thyestes 391-92.]

Interr'd beneath this Marble Stone,
Lie Saunt'ring Jack, and Idle Joan.
While rolling Threescore Years and One
Did round this Globe their Courses run;
If Human Things went Ill or Well;
  5
If changing Empires rose or fell;
The Morning past, the Evening came,
And found this Couple still the same.
They Walk'd and Eat, good Folks: What then?
Why then They Walk'd and Eat again:
  10
They soundly slept the Night away:
They did just Nothing all the Day:
And having bury'd Children Four,
Wou'd not take Pains to try for more.
Nor Sister either had, nor Brother:
  15
They seem'd just Tally'd for each other.
 Their Moral and Oeconomy
Most perfectly They made agree:
Each Virtue kept it's proper Bound,
Nor Trespass'd on the other's Ground.
  20
Nor Fame, nor Censure They regarded:
They neither Punish'd, nor Rewarded.
He car'd not what the Footmen did:
Her Maids She neither prais'd, nor chid:
So ev'ry Servant took his Course;
  25
And bad at First, They all grew worse.
Slothful Disorder fill'd His Stable;
And sluttish Plenty deck'd Her Table.
Their Beer was strong; Their Wine was Port;
Their Meal was large; Their Grace was short.
  30
They gave the Poor the Remnant-meat,
Just when it grew not fit to eat.
 They paid the Church and Parish-Rate;
And took, but read not the Receit:
For which They claim'd their Sunday's due,
  35
Of slumb'ring in an upper Pew.
 No Man's Defects sought They to know;
So never made Themselves a Foe.
No Man's good Deeds did They commend;
So never rais'd Themselves a Friend.
  40
Nor cherish'd They Relations poor:
That might decrease Their present Store:
Nor Barn nor House did they repair:
That might oblige Their future Heir.
 They neither Added, nor Confounded:
  45
They neither Wanted, nor Abounded.
Each Christmas They Accompts did clear;
And wound their Bottom round the Year.
Nor Tear, nor Smile did They imploy
At News of Public Grief, or Joy.
  50
When Bells were Rung, and Bonfires made;
If ask'd, They ne'er deny'd their Aid:
Their Jugg was to the Ringers carry'd
Who ever either Dy'd or Marry'd
Their Billet at the Fire was found;
  55
Who ever was depos'd, or Crown'd.
 Nor Good, nor Bad, nor Fools, nor Wise;
They wou'd not learn, nor cou'd advise:
Without Love, Hatred, Joy, or Fear,
They led—a kind of—as it were:
  60
Nor Wish'd, nor car'd, nor Laugh'd, nor Cry'd:
And so They liv'd; and so They dy'd.
1718

Matthew Prior has, from his own time to today, enjoyed a literary reputation as a writer of some very pleasing light poems. Samuel Johnson was to object that "[h]is numbers are such as mere diligence may attain; they seldom offend the ear, and seldom soothe it; they commonly want airiness, lightness, and facility: what is smooth is not soft. His verses always roll, but they seldom flow." Joseph Addison, though writing before "An Epitaph" was published, damned him with faint praise, conceding that Prior had "a happy talent of doggerel, where he writes on a known subject: where he tells us in plain intelligible language." I contend that both of these assessments of his poetic achievement are wrong and that Pope may well have anticipated Prior's achievement in "An Epitaph" when he wrote, in An Essay on Criticism,

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

I will focus my argument particularly on the last verse paragraph of "An Epitaph" but will need to present some analysis of the poem in general, as well as its position in literary history, before turning to that last, most brilliant part of this gently satiric poem.

The poem is a participant in a literary and philosophical argument that had been going on for a long time. It concerns the classical concept of otium, and Prior was probably responding to John Pomfret's The Choice (1700), a poem that presented the popular ideas associated with otium to a large English audience of the period. Samuel Johnson was later to say of Pomfret's poem, "Perhaps no composition in our language has been oftener perused." Published anonymously in 1700, it went through numerous editions and stimulated much speculation. It built on the Renaissance tradition of popular poems, such as "In Praise of a Contented Mind" (often known by its first line, "My mind to me a kingdom is"), though the idea goes back to classical times, most notably the work of one of Prior's idols, Horace. Put most simply, otium is a preference for the simple country life of retirement over the sophisticated life of the city or the court. Pomfret's version of the ideal is also often known as a typical "neoclassical" poem, as it stresses the value of the via media and restraint of the passions, even including romantic love. It is clear that Prior is responding to the detached ideal of otium presented by Pomfret by presenting his idea of what a retired country life might be like.

Prior, who had lost his diplomatic post and was imprisoned after the death of Queen Anne and the subsequent ejection of the Tory government in 1714, had a jaundiced view of the pleasures of retirement, and that is the primary theme of the poem. It first appeared in the 1718 edition of Poems on Several Occasions, a folio volume published by subscription, which, with the energetic promotion of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and other Tory writers and politicians, allowed Prior to retire in relative financial security (though he may not have been confident of this financial success when he wrote the poem). As Brean Hammond has recently noted,

Subscription publishing is now generally recognized to be a form of patronage: a hybrid form that called for co-operation between private patrons, who lobbied friends to subsidize the author prior to publication, and bookseller, who agreed to bear printing costs on this basis.¹

The success of this effort, and the direct patronage of Lord Edward Harley, managed to allow the last year and a half of Prior's life (1720-21) to be spent in that pleasant country retirement rejected by "An Epitaph."

"An Epitaph" takes the position that the restriction of the passions suggested by The Choice and other exemplars of otium would result not in a gentle, happy retired life but, rather, in no lifeat all. Though "Saunt'ring Jack and Idle Joan" are married, their sex life is not wildly passionate: "And having buried children four, / Would not take pains to try for more." These two lines, along with most of the first verse paragraph (lines 1-16), establish the metrical standard for the poem, the iambic tetrameter rhymed couplet. It is this metrical ground on which variations, particularly of the caesuras, will be played in order to establish an important part of the meaning of the poem. The form, of course, has a varied history but would probably have reminded readers in the second decade of the eighteenth century of Samuel Butler's Hudibras, the satirical poem of the previous century, which was still popular, as well as the poetry of Prior's friend Jonathan Swift, which was often written in the same verse form. Butler's form was so noticeable that it was called "the Hudibrastic," but usually when it exhibited some of the comic characteristics of double rhymes and false sight rhymes that Butler used so often in his long satiric poem. We know that Prior was familiar with Hudibras, as he reveals a close knowledge of it in his "Journey to Copt-Hall," written probably in 1689, though not published until 1907.² The rhymes in the first verse paragraph of "An Epitaph" are quite regular, and none of them is a double or false sight rhyme, the forms that were utilized by Butler (and elsewhere by Prior) for comic effect. It should be recalled that Sir Roger de Coverley of The Spectator admired Butler's false sight rhyme "And Pulpit, Drum Ecclesiastic / Was beat with fist, instead of a stick" (Hudibras 1.1. 11-12). This couplet is probably the best single example of the metrical games that I am talking about, though other examples abound.

After Prior introduces his passive protagonists, Jack and Joan, in this first verse paragraph, he points out that the fictive "marble stone" under which they lie tells a simple tale of a long ("threescore years and one") and in Prior's poem, at least, exceedingly dull life of rural retirement. The second through fifth verse paragraphs (17-56) use some of the techniques of the Theophrastan character popular in the seventeenth century to set up Jack and Joan as ideal character types by giving concrete examples of their conduct. Moral and economic terms are the focus of the second verse paragraph, with relations with neighbors and servants the subject matter.

The short third verse paragraph summarily dismisses their church duties, which they discharge, like all things, with a minimum of effort and attention. This might be contrasted with Sir Roger de Coverley's proper attention to his church duties in The Spectator for Monday, July 11, 1711. Sir Roger is generally a figure of gentle fun for Addison and Steele, who gently ridicule the Tory squire for his old-fashioned habits and characteristics, but in this essay, often titled "Sir Roger at Church," his actions are seen as worthy of unstinted praise. To the essayists, a life ofcountry retirement is an opportunity for good Christian actions, whereas Prior sees such a life as allowing the minimal efforts ("slumbering in an upper pew") of Jack and Joan.

The couplet of lines 47-48, "Each Christmas they accompts did clear, / And wound their bottom round the year," is about the only one that may cause trouble to modern readers. Most anthologies note that the "bottom" of this passage is a ball of thread that was used to tie up papers to be saved but not used any longer. Prior had used the same phrase in a letter to Lord Jersey, his sometime patron, on August 26, 1699, as he prepared to leave Paris from one of his diplomatic missions: "I have wound up my bottom, I have liquored my boots, and my foot is in the stirrup: that is I leave Paris tomorrow,"³ The OED lists this meaning as "¹⁵. A clew or nucleus on which to wind thread; also a skein or ball of thread" and shows several usages in this sense from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

It is, however, in the last verse paragraph that Prior's artistry comes to the fore and his metrical form most clearly expresses his anti-otium meaning. I will quote it in its entirely:

 Nor good, nor bad, nor fools, nor wise;
They would not learn, nor could advise:
Without love, hatred, joy, or fear,
They led—a kind of—as it were:
  60
Nor wished, nor cared, nor laughed, nor cried
And so they lived: and so they died.

The first line uses three caesuras of equal duration to divide the line into four equal negative parts of two syllables each. The first two are opposite abstract ideas, and the last two are less abstract human characters. The constant breaking of the line after each two syllables indicates the jerkiness of the thought process when considering Jack and Joan, such passive, thoughtless, indifferent people. The next line extends the syntax and the meter slightly, both negatively, as the speaker of the poem notes what they would and could not do in parallel, dividing the paired predicates to the subject "They" by a medial caesura. The third line of the verse paragraph utilizes three caesuras again, though now the two middle elements in the line are even shorter than in the first, one and two syllables respectively. The strong couplet form causes the reader to expect closure in the second line of each couplet, and it is this expectation that Prior brilliantly foils in line 60. The parallel of line 59 with the first line of this verse paragraph is not exact, as line 59 begins with the three-syllable unit "Without love," which can best be scanned as an iamb followed by a single stressed syllable. This variation should alert the reader to the potential for further change in the second half of the couplet, but Prior's change is so radical that thereader finds his or her tongue stumbling over the dashes, which impede the flow and almost stop it completely to imitate the thought processes of Jack and Joan. The retired country life, so highly prized by Pomfret and other proclaimers of the ideal of otium, has led them into a kind of mental paralysis exemplified by the stuttering dance of the syllables around the dashes: "They led—a kind of—as it were." The complete breakdown of thought into ambling, incomplete, incoherent utterances is brilliantly mimicked by the verses' own stumbling cadence and syntax.

After this brilliant line, Prior returns to a metrical echo of the first couplet of this verse paragraph, with three caesuras dividing the penultimate line into four equal iambs. The final line is divided into two equal and parallel grammatical units, contrasting their lives and their deaths around a final, strong caesura. The rhetorical emphasis on "died" is especially strong because of the masculine rhyme on the last word of the poem and the final verse paragraph. Prior's theme, that retiring to the country is not an ideal but, to a thoughtful person, a sentence of mental and moral death is beautifully exemplified here.

Notes

¹ Brean S. Hammond, "'A Poet, and a Patron, and Ten Pound': John Gay and Patronage," John Gay and the Scriblerians, ed. Peter Lewis and Nigel Wood (New York: St. Martins, 1988) 29. Hammond suggests that Gay may have seen Prior as a role model (30-31).

² Noted by Frances Mayhew Rippy in Matthew Prior, (Boston: Twayne, 1986) 10.

³ Charies Kenneth Eves, Matthew Prior: Poet and Diplomatist (New York: Columbia UP, 1939) 139.