Benjamin Franklin, Poet

Daniel Bosch unearths an epitaph Benjamin Franklin wrote for himself when he was 22 years old:

The Body of B. Franklin,

Printer;

Like the Cover of an old Book,

Its Contents torn out,

And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding,

Lies here, Food for Worms.

But the Work shall not be wholly lost:

For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more,

In a new & more perfect Edition,

Corrected and Amended

By the Author.

He was born Jan. 6. 1706.

Died 17

Bosch goes on to comment:

An epitaph typically reinforces values we look for in strong poems: gravity, brevity, levity, and the authority of the speaker’s experience, granted in epitaph’s special case by his death. Franklin is ahead of himself in his rock-solid grasp of these conventions. …

Franklin’s handling of his epitaph, which is of no use till God knows when, gives us a sharper likeness of him than the hundred-dollar bill. He offers us a concrete figure for his Christian faith, a book; yet he conveys a sense that his firmest faith is vested not in what the Good Book says, but what his forthcoming Autobiography will tell us. Whatever rewriting his soul will suffer, Franklin anticipates that he will be revised—corrected, and amended, and even gilded—on this side of the grave, while there is still time for him to enjoy his being issued in a second edition.

(Photo by Jason Langheine)