Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she’s at rest, and so am I.

These two lines present a deliberately blunt, epigrammatic “epitaph” voice: the speaker declares his wife’s burial as final (“here let her lie”) and then pivots to a darkly comic punchline—her rest in death brings him “rest” as well. The effect depends on irony and shock, turning a conventional funerary sentiment into a joke about marital strife and the relief of its end. Read as satire, it compresses a whole unhappy domestic narrative into a couplet, exposing how easily public forms of mourning can be subverted into private grievance. Whether taken as misogynistic humor or as a broader lampoon of epitaph conventions, its sting lies in the mismatch between expected tenderness and delivered resentment.