Epitaph on a Hare

William Cowper composed this gentle elegy for his pet hare, a creature who lived in his garden at Olney and would nestle in his sleeve. The poem refuses the grand gestures of heroic mourning, instead offering small, precise observations: the hare's fear of rain, its habit of sunning itself, the particular way it died. Cowper writes not as a poet performing grief but as a man who has lost a small, dear companion, and this plainness is precisely what gives the lines their power. The epitaph became a favorite among readers who found in its quiet devotion an alternative to the bombast of most funeral verse. It endures because it asks a simple question: can a life as small as a hare's matter enough to be mourned? Cowper's answer, written over two centuries ago, still moves. For readers who cherish the small, quiet things, who have loved unlikely pets, who believe tenderness deserves its own monuments.