In a Disused Graveyard


Its worth contrasting Auden’s cemetary with Frost’s graveyard:

In a Disused Graveyard

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
“The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.”
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.


One response to “In a Disused Graveyard”

  1. I like how there is a poem embedded in the poem. I imagine that Frost wrote those lines, but maybe he actually saw them on a tombstone and incorporated them into his poem.