A funeral in ten lines, with the corpse still conscious: that is the strange situation of "Exhume" by Marcette, Swamp Hag. The speaker lies "entombed" in melancholia, unable to climb out alone, and waits for spring to do the work. The central idea is that depression can feel like a burial, and that recovery may seem to belong to forces outside the self, such as flowers, birdsong and the turning of the year. The poem holds hope and helplessness together and settles neither.
The title is the first clever move. "Exhume" means to dig up what has been buried, and it is an imperative, a command or plea. Yet the word never appears in the poem. The speaker says instead "raise me from my tomb," so the demand sits outside the text, like a cry from the other side of a gravestone. The vocabulary of death is thorough: "entombed," "tomb," "crypt." Together they build a closed room, and the possessive "my" locks it. It appears four times ("my / Melancholia," "my tomb," "my tears," "my crypt"), so the grief, the grave and even the flooding all belong to the speaker. Even the line break after the first "my" holds the word in the air for a moment before the grand, clinical, many-syllabled "Melancholia" drops in.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme, and its rhythm comes from line length. The lines run from two syllables ("I lie," "Jonquils") to six ("To raise me from my tomb"). The short lines feel like held breath. The one real stumble comes at "I lie / I lie in wait." There is no comma, so the first "I lie" briefly sounds like a complete statement, a flat report of the speaker's state, before the repetition adds "in wait" and turns lying down into watching. That small expansion is the poem's emotional pivot, from simply being buried to expecting something. "Lie" also hovers between reclining and the dead body's lying in state, which suits a speaker who is half corpse.
The images of rescue are all springtime and all in motion: "blossoming" and "singing," both present participles. Against these ongoing verbs the speaker has only "lie." The jonquils get a line to themselves, a single bright word, typically yellow in the mind's eye, standing alone like a bud pushing up through bare ground. The comparison seems deliberate, since bulbs spend winter buried and return in spring, and the speaker pictures a similar return. The starlings add sound to the colour. Starlings are known for imitating other noises, though whether the poet intends that is an open question. If so, the song that might summon the speaker could be borrowed rather than original, a faint suggestion that comfort from outside may be imperfect.
The ending is the most unsettling part. "As my tears / Flood my crypt" can be read two ways, because "as" can mean "while" or "because." In one reading the flood happens alongside the waiting, a slow rise of water that threatens drowning. In the other it is part of the process, since water also feeds bulbs and makes graves into gardens. The poem refuses to say which. It also ends with no full stop, on the hard, closed word "crypt," so the water is still rising and spring has not yet arrived. Everything the speaker longs for is in the future, and everything oppressive is in the present tense.
The name attached to the poem, "Swamp Hag," suggests a persona, a mud-and-water character, which fits the watery ending, though this is only an inference from the name. What matters is the poem's compression. In ten short lines it builds a complete world of imprisonment, desire and uncertain rescue. It also gives a fair picture of low moods: the speaker is not dramatically suffering but lying still, hoping to be noticed by the world above. Its power is in that quiet patience, and in leaving the reader at the edge of the flood, unsure whether the tears will drown the speaker or help something grow.