Great Epigraphs

 

 

This is the epigraph that Edgar Allan Poe chose for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture." -- Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial

Formidable and fascinating in its own right, the sentence is perfectly apposite to the story it heads.

Poe's example makes me want to compose a succinct ode to the art of the epigraph, which involves not only a cunning eye for a great and somewhat out-of-the-way quotation but also a determination to build on the quoted material -- to use it to quicken a new work into being.

T. S. Eliot was terrific at the game.

 

Here is the epigraph Adous Huxley used for Point Counter Point:

‘Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws—
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?’

—Fulke Greville

Joseph Conrad chose these lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faeire Queene for his epitaph:

"Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please"

Comments

[Kyril Alexander Calsoyas]

Marvelous juxtapositions; epigraphs and epitaphs sounding the deep seabed.

A little poem as a compliment and complement to your thoughts.

THE SHRINE

You came seeking a sign,
Quiet pervades the shrine,
The sacrifice is made,
Light illumines shade,
Gathering winds revealed,
The future is unsealed,

Circles end and begin,
We are where we have been,
Time allows and denies,
Despite the tears we cry,
Do whatever we may,
Tomorrow becomes today.

Memory clears and clouds,
Wedding dresses and shrouds,
The shrine greets us all,
Spring, summer, winter, fall,
Like the waves in the sea,
We will be and not be.

[Thomas Moody]

How about the epigraph to Malcolm Lowry's great novel "Under the Volcano" from Goethe "Whosoever unceasingly strives upward... him can we save."

[David Lehman]

Great epigraph, TM.