In a Disused Graveyard
In a Disused Graveyard - meaning Summary
Denial at the Graveside
Frost’s poem observes living visitors in an old graveyard and the ironic contradiction between tombstone proclamations of death’s certainty and the absence of the dead returning. The stones insist that visitors will one day become permanent residents, yet the speaker notes a cultural shrinking from mortality. He imagines a flippant explanation—people have simply stopped dying—and suggests that the living might accept that comforting untruth. The poem quietly interrogates rituals of remembrance and the human tendency to evade or sanitize the reality of death while maintaining its outward forms.
Read Complete AnalysesThe 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.
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