Robert Frost’s “In a Disused Graveyard” pictures a burial ground that still attracts the living, who come to read the old gravestones, even though no new dead are being laid there. The inscriptions keep promising that today’s visitors will one day return as the dead, but the stones themselves notice that this promise has stopped coming true. That gives the poem its strange, gently ironic mood: death remains certain in rhyme, yet absent in fact in this neglected place. The speaker half-jokes that the stones could be told men have simply stopped dying because they hate to die, and the gravestones would believe it. Beneath the wit is a more sober awareness that people avoid thinking about death—and that even a graveyard can lose its purpose.
In a Disused Graveyard — Summary
The living come with grassy tread To read the gravestones on the hill; The graveyard draws the living still, But never any more 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.