A skull sits among the speaker’s books, dominating the room with its empty eye sockets and fixed grin. The speaker addresses it directly in the deepening gloom, half-joking that if it could suddenly speak, it might reveal a grisly secret about death. The mood is eerie and gothic, but also wry: the skull seems to mock the living with its knowing, sardonic stare.
By the end, the speaker’s thoughts turn personal. The speaker wonders what rude hands dug up the body and wrenched the skull from its grave, then admits that the same indignity could happen to anyone. There is an unsettling flash of identification: one day the speaker’s own skull might be resurrected as a curiosity on a stranger’s desk. That closing thought gives the poem its dark, mordant twist, mixing dread with humor about the strange afterlife of human remains.