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Repetition, Refrain, and Epitaph

1986; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2873042

1080-6547

Debra Fried,

Digital Humanities and Scholarship

The capacity of this gravestone inscription to be read forwards and backwards seems an apt figure for the ultimate, universal, and certain fate it curtly predicts. The question posed in the first line is decisively answered three times merely by reshuffling in the next three lines the words of the first; in asking the initial question, the epitaph supplies all the terms of its simple and resounding answer. This palindromic epitaph takes about as far as it can the repetitious stalling that is characteristic of many utterances from the tomb. An inscription on a gravestone is an extreme form of writing aware of itself as writing because aware of its divorce from voice, of its condition as a distant trace of a voice now stilled. What does this repetitiveness have to do with the sense of epitaphs as emphatically written, incised, mute? I propose to consider this question through a look at the relation between epitaph and refrain; particularly, through a close examination of a few nineteenth-century instances of poetic refrains that function like epitaphs and epitaphs that repeat like refrains. I will begin with an iterative gravestone inscription of the Halt, traveler> variety and an embittered version of this epitaphic convention by Kipling; then I will turn to texts by Whitman and Poe that use refrains to interpret the tendency of voices from beyond the grave to repeat themselves in their desire to foster remembrance. I will argue that the repeating phrases or patterns these poems attribute to the dead speaker belie, in their very repetitions, the fiction that the dead can speak at all; at the same time this fragile but consoling fiction is uneasily reinstated, for the manner in which epitaphs repeat fosters a dialogue between the dead speaker and the living reader. Like other signs that mark a site, epitaphs combine invitation