Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise.

These lines are from Fitz-Greene Halleck’s elegiac poem “Marco Bozzaris,” written in the early 1820s amid American enthusiasm for the Greek War of Independence. Halleck commemorates the real Greek patriot and military leader Markos Botsaris (often Anglicized as “Bozzaris”), who was killed in 1823. The stanza functions as a graveside benediction—an imagined tribute spoken over the fallen hero—reflecting the period’s Romantic taste for martial valor, noble death, and idealized friendship. In the United States, the poem became one of Halleck’s best-known works and helped popularize philhellenic sentiment through a highly memorable refrain-like quatrain.

The speaker offers a compact epitaph that blends tenderness with moral certainty. “Green be the turf above thee” is a wish for peaceful rest and a living, renewing memorial; the dead are honored not with monuments but with nature’s gentle covering. Calling the fallen “Friend of my better days” frames the relationship as ethically formative: the friend represents the speaker’s noblest self and past. The final couplet—“None knew thee but to love thee, / Nor named thee but to praise”—asserts an ideal of unblemished reputation, turning the subject into a model of virtue whose memory is unanimously cherished. The stanza’s simplicity and balanced phrasing help explain its frequent quotation as a general elegy.