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.
I found this poem interesting for many reasons. I had to read it more than the other poems because I thought the flow of the poem made it easy to read fast and miss the meaning. From reading his biography, I now associate many of his poems that are about death with his father's death. Although I am not certain if this poem has to do with his father, I think it could be a possiblity.
Frost claims the lie is that "men hate to die and have stopped dying now forever".I agree. Regarding death, I believe that people are not so much afraid of dying as of being forgotten after they die. I think this is why Frost has the subject of his poem be about a tombstone, since it is the only physical thing that tells the world that this person once lived and had a small effect. Perhaps this is what the tombstone means when it claims that "tomorow the dead will come to stay", meaning that once those who come to visit the stone leaves, they will forget the dead person, and continue living. Thus, this is when a person truly dies, when no one living remembers them. Then they cease to be in both body and mind.
ReplyDeleteI like this poem.