Epitaph

Epitaph - meaning Summary

Passion Reduced to Compliance

Pound’s short epitaph presents a character, Leucis, whose grand ambitions for passionate feeling collapse into bland compliance. The couplet registers an ironic anticlimax: intent and intensity are reduced to social obliging. As a mini-biography in two lines, the poem comments on missed potential and the ways personal aspiration can yield to habit, decorum, or resignation, leaving desire unfulfilled and identity diminished.