"Epilogue" begins by describing a time of day (or, really, night) when people's minds tend to race: "the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time / When you set your fancies free." In other words, the time in the middle of the night, when all the world seems quiet and people's imaginations often wander. Metaphorically, this is the time when the mind is set "free" from the constraints and distractions of daily life. (The speaker might also be building on the symbolic connotations of "midnight" and describing the moments shortly before death, when people tend to reflect back on their lives.)
The soft sibilance and muffled /f/ alliteration of these lines cast a gentle hush over the poem, evoking the quiet of this hour:
At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,
When you set your fancies free,
The speaker wonders if, at such a time, "your fancies" will meander toward the speaker's grave (that is, "Will [those thoughts] pass to where" the speaker is buried). By the end of the stanza, it becomes clear that the speaker is addressing his own loved ones here and anticipating their reaction to his death. (Asolando, the collection in which "Epilogue" appears, was in fact published on the day of Robert Browning's death. As such, it's fair to take the speaker here as representing the poet himself.)
The antimetabole of line 4 emphasizes the mutual feeling between the speaker and his reader[s], placing their love on either side of a caesura:
[...] who once so loved you, whom you loved so
The speaker anticipates that those he loved (and those who loved him in return) will be sad to think of him trapped in his grave, deep underground (i.e., to think that he is "imprisoned" and physically "low"). In the speaker's opinion, however, only "fools" believe that death entails some kind of "imprison[ment]." The caesura in line 3 calls attention to this important idea, setting it apart from the rest of the stanza:
Will they pass to where—by death, fools think, imprisoned—
The speaker will elaborate on this idea throughout the rest of the poem, but already this line hints that he believes death is not necessarily a firm, final ending—and, it follows, that people don't need to "Pity," or feel sorry for, those in their graves.
Of course, the speaker doesn't come right out and say, "Will you feel sorry for me when I'm dead?" Instead, this opening stanza consists of a single sentence stretched across five lines. As the poem slowly unfurls down the page, its twisty, complex language subtly mimics the manner in which those "fancies" freely wander about before landing, at last, on the image of the speaker in his grave.
These opening lines also begin to establish the poem's form. "Epilogue" uses a complex meter. Its lines vary widely in length but maintain a clear, primarily trochaic rhythm (a trochee being poetic foot with two syllables arranged in a stressed-unstressed, DUM-da, pattern). In each stanza, the number of stressed beats per line generally falls into a 6-4-6-6-2 pattern—that is, the first line contains six stresses, the second contains four, and so on. Take lines 1-3:
At the | midnight | in the | silence | of the | sleep-time
When you | set your | fancies | free
Will they | pass to | where—by | death, fools | think, im- | prisoned—
The movement from stressed to unstressed beats creates what's known as a falling rhythm. Here, it subtly evokes the sensation of drifting off to sleep (or, perhaps, drifting away into death).
Line 3 switches things up a bit, as it switches from trochees to iambs (da-DUM) at the comma halfway through:
Low he | lies who | once so | loved you, | whom you | loved so,
The metrical reversal creates a kind of mirror between the two halves of the line, subtly evoking the mutual, mirrored love between the speaker and his listeners.
Finally, the stanza ends with:
—Pity | me?
This line is missing its final syllable, a technique called catalexis. The final lines of every stanza will scan exactly the same way, making them feel abrupt and incomplete. This, in turn, reflects the speaker's belief that death is not a firm ending.
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