"Silence the pianos and with muffled drum..."

Personal news. The difference between epigraphs, epigrams & epitaphs. The poetry of W. H. Auden.

Photo by Kevin Andre on Unsplash

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, 
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, 
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

from "Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden

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This past Sunday morning, as I was getting the children ready for Mass, my mother’s name appeared on my phone screen so I quickly answered it.

“Eric died,” she said.

Eric was my godfather’s son and childhood friend. He collapsed at a performance at the JFK Center in Boston and he could not be revived despite the immediate, high-quality medical care. He was 51-years-old.

I had known Eric all my life. His sister was my parents’ flower girl at their wedding, and he was just a baby then. Our families lived in the same apartment building when I was very little. Our families spent many major holidays together. We lived in the same city and went to the same high school where he was two years ahead of me.

Eric, the extrovert, was always on stage. And I, the quiet one, remained behind the curtain. He lived for the lights and was always acting or singing in lead roles. Meanwhile, I worked as a techie and stage manager and watching him perform from the darkened wings—except for that one time when I got wrangled into donning a nun costume to play his mother in A Comedy of Errors.

Since he was a teenager he never seemed to settle in his expectations. The work of an artist is to know what is possible, to know what excellence looks like, to spend one’s life closing the gap between one’s skills and the art they imagine. Eric loved to do so much and he wanted everyone to have as much fun doing what he was doing. He loved—meaning that he wanted the good of others. He loved without compromise.

Through the years, as we both moved into adulthood, we saw each other rarely, sporadically, if at all—until very recently when my children joined the Iskwelahang Pilipino where his family was active and from where I had graduated so many years ago. It was a blessing to see him become an excellent husband and father, a remarkable musician, a passionate educator, and an overall remarkable human being.

I was supposed to meet Eric at the school on Sunday afternoon, the day after he passed away. It is hard to fathom not seeing him again.

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All day Sunday I was in shock.

And then on Monday evening I attended my Craft of Poetry class where we were studying the form of the epigram and learning about the significance of rhyme in versification.

As an example of the power of simple rhymes, I recited the last two stanzas of “Funeral Blues” without explaining its personal connection.

Hence the epigraph for this post.

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All my life I seemed to confuse the words epigraph, epigram, and the epitaph.

The epigraph easily has the most distinct meaning of the three words. Simply put, it is a phrase, quotation, or a poem set at the beginning of a text to invite comparison, counter-point, or summary.

Although an epigram is something very different, the etymology shows that they all come from the same Greek word: ἐπιγράφειν (epigráphein), which means "to write on, to inscribe."

In his concise one-page essay, Cut in Stone: The Epigram in English, David Middleton says the qualities of the epigram “include condensation, not elaboration; the abstraction and summation of experience, not an extended presentation of its data; and closure, not only the intellectual closure of moral judgment but the corresponding technical closure of metrical form and, especially in English, of end rhyme.”

He goes on to say,

In fact, of all literary forms, the epigram, including, the short verse epitaph, is perhaps the most timeless, the least affected by literal and philosophical fashions. It is also one of the most demanding of forms, for it is a distillation of much complex experience into a little wisdom. And its brevity is deceptive.

If you need an example of an epigram/epitaph, here’s a biting one in iambic tetrameter from John Dryden:

Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she's at rest – and so am I.

And going back to Auden, his “Epitaph on a Tyrant” is an example of tragic wit. This mock elegy was written in 1939 as Fascism was sweeping across Europe. At six-lines it is a terse and cogent depiction of how murderous depots work. The poem ends,

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

In this current state of affairs, I wish this poem were not so relevant as it had been when it was first written. I trotted this out when Putin first invaded Ukraine. And of course everything seems so riddled with the evils of war and atrocity more so now…

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

I am 49, and I realize the huge gap between my skills and the poetry I know is possible. When I write I fight for every iamb. Now in this masters program I think I am finally discerning the music and rhythm from the noise but I am still writing small things with great effort.

Our professor, James Matthew Wilson, (whom my friend

Roseanne T. Sullivan

interviewed) asked us to write a 2-line epigram in iambic pentameter for part of our homework.

I came up with this epitaph for myself:

This lovely Zina wished to be a saint.
Alas, her nature won—and so she ain’t!

But better words must be said of Eric whose dedication to his craft and to the success of all those around him should shame us all:

This man who strove for us to be the best
has left us now. Oh God, how we were blessed!

My friends… life is short.

Go forth and love without compromise!