Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave

Ah, ar You Digging on My Grave? was commencement ceremony publish in the Saturday Review on September 27, 1913, thus in Thomas inflexibles 1914 collection, satires of Circumstance Lyrics and Reveries with Miscellaneous Pieces. The rime reflects braws interest in finis and events beyond everyday reality, but these subjects be presented humorously, with a strong dose of badinage and satire. This treatment is somewhat unusual for audacious, who in equivalent manner produced a number of more heavy poems concerning death. In Ah, are You Digging On My Grave? a deceased muliebrity carries on a dialogue with an man-to-man who is disturbing her austere site.The identity of this figure, the spadeful of the fair sexs grave is unfathomable through the first gear half of the poem (Ruby 1). As the woman attempts to guess who the shovel is, she reveals her desire to be remembered by non-homogeneous figures she was acquainted with when she was alive. In a serial of ironic turns, the responses of the digger show that the womans acquaintances a loved ane, family relatives, and a despised enemy take hold every in the end(predicate) forsaken her memory. Finally it is revealed that the digger is the womans pawl, but the canine too, is unconcerned with his power mistress and is digging only so it can bury a bone.though the poem contains a humorous tonicity, the epitome Hardy paints is bleak. The bloodless are close completely eliminated from the memory of the breathing and do non enjoy any put to work of contentment This somber candidate is veritable(prenominal) of Hardys rhythm, which often presented a skeptical and negative view of the adult male condition (Ruby 1). Hardy was born in 1840 and raised in the region of Dorestshire, England, the primer coat for the Wessex countryside that would later appear in his fictionalization and metrical composition. He attended a local anesthetic school until he was sixteen, when his mother paying a lot of money for him to be apprenticed to an architect in Dorchester.In 1862 he moved to London, where he worked as an architect, remaining there for a breaker point of five years. Between 1865 and 1867 Hardy wrote many poems, none of which were published. In 1867 he returned to Dorchester and, duration continuing to work in architecture, began to relieve novels in his spare age. Hardy became convert that if he was to make a living paper, he would have to do so as a novelist (Ruby 2). Drawing on the way of career he sorb in Dorsetshire as a spring chicken and the wide range of English inditers with which he as familiar, Hardy worn-out(a) closely thirty years as a novelist ahead devoting himself to poetry.In 1874 Hardy marry Emma Lavinia Gifford, who would become subject of many of his poems. They spent several years in comfort until the 1880s, when marital troubles began to shake the closeness of their union. Hardys first book of verse was published in 1898, when h e was 58 years old and had achieved a titanic degree of success as a novelist. Although his verse was not nearly as successful as his novels, Hardy continue to focus on his poetry and published seven more books of verse before his death, developing his confidence (Ruby2).With the composition of the Dynasts A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars (1904-08) an epic diachronic drama written in verse, Hardy was hailed as a major poet. He was praised as a master of his craft, and his writing was admired for its great emotional bear on and technical skill. Hardy continued to write until just before his death in 1928. Despite his wish to be conceal with his family, influential sentiment for his burial in Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey instigated a bare compromise the removal of his heart, which was buried in Dorchester, and the cremation of his body, which was interred in the Abbey (Ruby 2).The structure of Ah, Are You Digging On My Grave? is a familiar one, although not one unremarkably associated with poetry the joke. A situation is set up and briefly developed, then the punch key out turns everything on its head. In Hardys bitter joke a dead woman has high- flown expectations of the living her loved one will remain forever folding to her her family will continue to look afterwards her exactly as they did in life and even her enemys wickedness will not wane. The poems punch line deflates her hopes and reveals them as unreal and ridiculous.Hardy sets up his joke carefully, with a poets attention to the language he uses (Ruby 4). The atmosphere is set in the first two lines. A sigh from the grave seems to signal profound meditation on morality and love. The phrasing of the two lines is al around self-consciously poetic. Such language is hold throughout the first three stanzas. Expressions like planting rue, Deaths gin. The supply that shuts on all flesh gift feeling that is heightened, more sensitive and honest than every day, emotion (Ruby 4).They awak en a sense of tragedy and compassion in the subscriber, But Hardy is merely riding horse us up for the punch line. They tone of the poems language begins begins to modification in the fourth stanza. One only notices it, so great is the readers surprise that it was a little hound dog that was poeticizing all along. The first seeds of doubt have been planted this poem may not be exactly what it at first seemed. The dead woman recognizes the dogs voice and utters the article of faith she feels most deeply a dogs love outshines anything human (Ruby 4). But when the dog replies, the reader realizes that Hardy is up to something else.The poetry and sentimentality have vanished. The dogs voice is as ordinary and crude(a) as that of the Wessex country folk. He deflates her last hope so offhandedly and without deception that its effect is brutal. At the same time the dead womans expectations most her lover, her family and enemy are portrayed as products of the same ridiculous sentime ntal outlook (Hardy 4). After coming to the end of Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave? the reader realizes that the title would have been more close even if less interesting if called, Oh No One Is Digging on My Grave. (Ruby 10).