AN “EPITAPH” is the inscription on a gravestone (not to be confused with an “epigraph,” or quotation at the beginning of a book or poem). The word comes from the Greek phrase meaning “over a tomb,” and it once referred to the words spoken during funeral rites. Epitaphs can be witty or sentimental, and many caution the reader about his or her own mortality. In seventeenth-century England, the epitaph even rose to prominence as a genre of poetry—though these epitaphs, by poets like Ben Jonson and John Donne, were not necessarily inscribed on graves. Know which words mark your favorite author’s final resting place? Take this quiz and see how many epitaphs you can identify.
1. Which writer is buried beneath these lines from her own novel: “…that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great”?
2. Which satirist’s grave reads, “Where fierce indignation can no longer tear his heart”?
3. Which mystery author’s gravestone has these lines from Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “My Wife”: “STEEL TRUE, BLADE STRAIGHT”?
4. Whose grave is marked with these lines from his own poem: “Cast a cold Eye / On life, on Death. / Horseman, pass by”?
5. “AGAINST YOU I WILL FLING MYSELF, UNVANQUISHED AND UNYIELDING, O DEATH!” is which writer’s epitaph?
ANSWERS
1. Willa Cather. The lines are from My Ántonia.
2. Jonathan Swift.
3. Arthur Conan Doyle.
4. William Butler Yeats. The lines are the last in “Under Ben Bulben.” Additional trivia: Larry McMurtry titled his first novel Horseman, Pass By.
5. Virginia Woolf.