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Explore the Craft of Writing Poetry Liturgical Verse Epicedium (Latin) is a funeral song directed to and read before the corpse. Originally it was written in elegiac couplets but with time, the epicedium was written using other frames. It is the theme that identifies the genre, the tone is mournful. Here is an epicedium written in trimeter sixains with rhyme abcabc defdef etc found at Bartleby.com: Epicedium by Horace L Traubel19th century American poet Like to the leaf that falls, Like to the rose that fades, Thou at and still are not! We whom this thought enthralls, We whom this mystery shades, Are bared before our lot! Like to the light gone out, Like to the sun gone down, Thou art ---and yet we feel That something more than doubt, And more than Nature's frown, The Great Good must reveal. 'T is not with thankless heart Nor yet with covert hand, We reach from deeps to thee: We take out grief apart, And with it bravely stand Beside the voiceless sea! O, gentle memory mine--- I fill the world with thee, And with thy blessing sleep! But for thy love divine To warm the day for me, Why should I wake or weep?