Epigram by ,The exotically named Adelaide Crapsey was a New York-born poet and English literature teacher whose short life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis. Her poetry output was fairly substantial but she will best be remembered by students of 19th and 20th-century poets as the inventor of a writing technique called “the cinquain”. This was probably born out of her love of the Japanese “tanka and haiku” forms of writing. It’s a kind of compressed style of writing that had many admirers including another famous writer, Ezra Pound.
Epigram by Adelaide Crapsey
If illness’ end be health regained then I
Will pay you, Asculapeus, when I die.
The poem operates through a sharp ironic inversion: recovery does not inspire gratitude but postpones a kind of debt, imagined as a promise that can be honoured only through death. In doing so, it unsettles conventional expectations of healing, faith, and reverence, presenting the relationship with divine power as distinctly transactional rather than devotional.
Its tone is dry and restrained, shaped by almost clinical phrasing such as “illness ended” and “health restored.” This emotional coolness stands in stark contrast to the gravity of mortality, producing a deliberate sense of detachment. The reference to Asculapeus, the Greek god of medicine, places the speaker within a classical tradition of supplication, yet the allusion is tinged with scepticism: the god is not appealed to for mercy but reminded of an obligation, as though bound by contract.
Formally, the poem’s two-line structure reflects Adelaide Crapsey’s hallmark concision. Stripped of ornament, it reads like a compressed epigram, anticipating modernist minimalism. Composed in the early twentieth century, the poem signals a departure from Victorian moral earnestness, aligning instead with emerging secular and sceptical attitudes toward medicine, religion, and authority.
Unlike Crapsey’s more familiar nature-driven cinquains shaped by introspection and grief, this poem reveals a sharper, unsentimental edge. It also gestures toward modern anxieties about professionalised care, suggesting that healing itself has become a service to be reckoned with rather than an act of grace. Though brief, the poem holds a distinctive place in her work for its intellectual precision and ironic force.