“Lapping-up of Matter”: Epitaphic Closure in Elegies

Abstract

Postponing until last the chapter that addresses more strictly “poetic” epitaphs, namely those that conclude longer elegies, provides the felicitous opportunity to “end on ending,” but there is admittedly something perverse, on first glance, at delaying the most “literary” analysis until the conclusion. Yet it has been the contention throughout this study that what remains most intriguing about the early modern epitaph (and has been heretofore “strangely neglected”—a familiar critical gesture¹) is its re-citation. What is of interest is an examination of the epitaph not as a generic tradition unto itself but rather as a citational move within a whole range of English Renaissance contexts. Most non-“poetic” epitaphs do not merit the close reading normally associated with great lyric poetry—indeed, there might be nothing more to read beyond the word “epitaph.” But the placement of these epitaphs matters and is almost invariably significant. That the analysis of the epitaph’s conceptual import and situational use beyond the anthologized standards can be rewarding in itself confirms the richness of “epitaphs” in the period. The most enduring and familiar inheritance of epitaphic re-citation can be found in its suggestive troping of closure. By turns elemental and superfluous, poetic and prosaic, closure with an epitaph is probably the most frequently applied mode of quoting death, yet at the same time the least theorized, in part because it appears so obvious: of course you would end a life’s account with an epitaph.