A speaker asks his beloved whether she would walk with his funeral and stand nearby while he is lowered into the clay grave. Her answer is no—not from coldness, but because the sight of “living idiots” crowding around his coffin would enrage her so much that she would tear them with her teeth.
That reply turns a conventional question about mourning into something raw and possessive. The speaker seems to be testing her devotion, but her response refuses social ritual entirely. Grief here is not quiet or pious; it is fierce, almost animal. The mood is macabre and intense, mixing death with violent love. Rather than finding comfort in ceremony, the beloved can only fixate on the one person she would lose, and the living mourners become unbearable.