Today’s Poem: The English Epigram

Illustrated by two poems from Walter Savage Landor

A memorial for Apollonius of Tyana in southern Anatolia. (Wikimedia Commons)

True wit, Alexander Pope once memorably suggested, shows us “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.” That’s a useful phrase to keep in mind when thinking about sayings, saws, truisms, mnemonics, adages, aphorisms, apophthegms — the whole range of moral and practical knowledge transmitted in brief and easily memorizable form, from “April showers bring May flowers” and “Thirty Days Hath September” to “Sohcahtoa” and “Righty tighty, lefty loosey.”

The poetic epigram, however, is something slightly different from the pithy saying that often called an epigram in prose, or even from an epigrammatical line or two in a longer poem.

It’s a little hard to say quite what that difference is. Derived from the Greek for “inscription,” epigrams are literally poems short enough to be inscribed on stone, and the ancient Greek Anthology contains hundreds of them. But as the form passed to the Romans, it poured into certain shapes, defined mostly by the success of the first-century poet Martial, who composed over 1,500 Latin epigrams — some obscene, some melancholy, many satirical, but all short, pointed, expressing a complete thought, often reliant on unlikely metaphors, obviously poetic in form, and producing in their final words some satisfying twist in the grammar, the thought, or the metaphor. And good epigrams add the quality that good adages have: the quality of sticking in memory.

With the Renaissance translation of the Greek Anthology and rediscovery of the Roman poets, there came a revival of the Latin epigram in Europe, and the form quickly became popular among scholars and courtiers. It is during the Renaissance — the towering scholar of his day, Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609), would review that work to write a taxonomy of the epigram — that the epigram’s various sub-genres become more clearly discernible: the riddles, the mnemonics, the didactic and moral apophthegms, the sundial mottoes, the miniature elegies, the religious satires known as pasquilli, the sexual puns, the epitaphs and humorous gravestone inscriptions, and perhaps a dozen other types.

Just as nearly all determined poetic forms in English are borrowed from classical and Romance languages, so the epigram came into English with the Renaissance. Something in the epigram, however, unlike the sonnet or even the ode, seemed to resist English — or perhaps that’s better expressed the other way around: There’s something in English that doesn’t want to produce the poetic epigram. Perhaps the reason comes from the nature of English grammar, which requires word placement to tell us a sentence’s meaning. Or perhaps it has to do with the fact that rhyme is the clearest way in English to announce that a short burst of words is poetry, and rhyme requires at least two lines. (Many epigrams in the Greek Anthology are a single-line long, the fact of their being poetry signaled simply by the metrical quality of the syllables.)

Of course, the resistance of the language never stopped English poets from producing epigrams, particularly during the centuries when poets were schooled in classical languages. Nearly all major poets have turned their hands to the form, from the eighteenth-century Alexander Pope — who wrote the inscription for the collar of the prince’s pet: I am His Highness’s dog at Kew. / Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you? — to the twentieth-century William Butler Yeats, who wrote, for a fellow Irish literary figure, “To a Poet, Who Would Have Me Praise Certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine”: You say, as I have often given tongue / In praise of what another’s said or sung, / ’Twere politic to do the like by these, / But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

It is a form congenial to poets whose natural bent is for concision and the transparency that makes a poem look easy though it is in fact extremely difficult: to A.E. Housman (1859–1936), for example, or Philip Larkin (1922–1985). A handful of minor poets have proved surprisingly good at the epigram: Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) with his humorous series of sundial mottoes, for example, or the faded Frances Cornford (1886–1960).

And yet, despite the occasional forays of major poets into the form, and despite the occasional achievements of minor poets, the poetic epigram has never succeeded in English as well as the sonnet. Only three significant poets in the language have undertaken a serious exploration of the epigram: Ben Jonson (1572–1637), Robert Herrick (1591–1674), and J.V. Cunningham (1911–1985).

Jonson, Herrick, and Cunningham (Wikimedia Commons)

The epigrams of all three deserve to be read extensively, and here at Poems Ancient and Modern we will be exploring their work as time and space (and copyrights) allow. But for today, to mark the form, let’s take two quatrains by the Victorian Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), who is often included in anthologies solely because of these works.

Landor was an interesting figure — a man as definitively out of time as any in English literature: an 18th-century Augustan, come too late to be a peer of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Samuel Johnson (1709–1784); a 19th-century political firebrand, come too soon to foment the revolutions he desired. He never quite fit in, and his work was unreinforced by poetic followers and underappreciated by the public. He could not be a Romantic like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and he could not be a Victorian like Tennyson and Browning. The age kept his talent constrained.

Walter Savage Landor, from an 1864 newspaper obituary (Wikimedia Commons)

One sign of the genuineness of the talent is the fact that other poets have always appreciated his work. Landor preached violence in his political prose, unable to stomach the emerging industrial age. Or, in truth, unable even to understand the new order, which left him flailing in political writings that have not aged well. In his poetry, however, he responded to the industrial remaking of England by finding refuge in a deeply classical verse: typically, short poems on grief and the old virtues, written with a classically serene tone. “Rose Aylmer” is a good example, or “Mild is the Parting Year.”

And then there are the two verses by Landor we look at today: “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher” and “Dirce.” A strict cataloger might argue that these are not precisely epigrams but simply brief poems, lacking the teaching element of an adage. Our sense of poetic brevity, however, has been shaped by centuries of epigrams. We read these verses from Landor in an epigrammatical way, and rightly so, as both have the power to stick in memory, which is the first quality necessary for a well-made epigram. And they have the second necessary quality for a satisfying epigram, snapping closed like a well-made box.

In pentameter lines rhymed abab, “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher” puts an ideal of the ancient philosopher — a Stoic, perhaps, with a hint of the Empedoclean and a sense of the Aristotelian distinction of physis and techne. Ripeness is all, and as the fire of life dims, he is “ready to depart.”

In a common-meter quatrain (four-foot lines alternating with three-foot, rhymed abab) “Dirce” references the myth of Dirce, a Theban queen killed by being tied to the horns of a bull by the sons of Antiope, in revenge for her cruelty to their mother. Really, though, the poem is about any beautiful woman — so beautiful that Charon, ferrying her across the Styx, may forget that she is only a ghost.

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Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher

by Walter Savage Landor

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife: 
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art: 
I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life; 
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

Dirce

by Walter Savage Landor

Stand close around, ye Stygian set, 
    With Dirce in one boat conveyed! 
Or Charon, seeing, may forget 
    That he is old and she a shade.

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