Six lines, three couplets, and a whole scene: a woman's corpse on the table, an audience leaning in, and then a voice that steps back to say what everyone is really watching. The poem's central idea comes from the collision of two registers, the clinical and the theatrical. Dissection is knowledge, but it is also a show, and the pleasure of that show is something the poem makes us slightly uneasy about enjoying.
The title sets the scene, and the vocabulary of the last stanza ("divertisement," "tragedy") suggests a theatre rather than a classroom. The first couplet, "her dead body is opened / like the king's business," begins with a simile that refuses to behave. We expect a body opened like a book or a flower. Instead we get official business, something done in the name of authority and not to be questioned. "Opened" fits a session, a letter, an inquiry. Notice too that the woman is only "her," and that the verb is passive. Nobody is named as holding the knife. The cutting happens the way state business happens, with power at work and no face attached.
The second couplet gives the onlookers a pronoun as anonymous as hers: "they see themselves / in a royal library of meat." The line break after "themselves" leaves that act of recognition hanging for a beat. It can be read two ways. The onlookers may see their own mortality in the opened body. Or they may see their own learning and rank reflected back, since a library is a collection of knowledge and this one is "royal," a possession kept by those with power. The organs become volumes to be read. The word "royal" echoes "king's" from the first stanza and ties the two together, so that the body is not just studied but owned. Then "meat" arrives, a single blunt syllable after the stately "royal library." The dignity of inquiry is undercut by the word for the butcher's counter.
The final couplet changes voice. The lowercase and missing punctuation carry on, but the diction turns abstract and old-fashioned. "Divertisement" is an archaic-looking spelling of a word for an entertainment or diversion, and "though it be" is a formal, old-style subjunctive. It sounds like a sentence lifted from older prose, though the poem doesn't say where it comes from, and that is only an inference from its tone. The syntax is knotted: even a diversion, if it goes "deep," becomes "a strange perfection in tragedy." "Deep" is a clever word here, meaning profound but also quietly physical, the depth of an incision, which pulls us back to the table. The claim itself is unsettling. Tragedy has a kind of perfection, a completeness that draws us in, and so the dead woman has become a well-made spectacle. The poem never says who is speaking. It could be the lecturer, or the audience excusing itself. That ambiguity implicates the reader, who has been watching too.
There is no rhyme, but sound still holds the poem together. A long *e* runs through it: "see," "themselves," "library," "meat," "be," "deep," "tragedy." It works like a faint chime. "Meat" at the end of one stanza and "deep" at the start of the next link the body to the idea of depth across the white space. The rhythm is plain and clipped in the first two stanzas, with short words and short lines. It becomes longer and slower in the third, as if the language itself were putting on formal dress. The poem has no full stop, so the verdict on tragedy is not neatly closed off.
The poem is significant for how much it packs into so little, and for the question it raises beyond the page. What happens when we look at a body, or at suffering, as spectators? Knowledge, art and news all depend on looking, and the poem does not simply condemn that. It admits the "strange perfection" that draws people to watch. The woman remains the one thing everybody looks at and nobody hears, and the poem leaves us to feel the weight of that silence.