“Ah, Are You Digging My Grave” by Thomas Hardy Essay

Ah, Are You Digging On My Grave? by Thomas stout has six regular stanzas of six lines, which are create verbally sequentially. The lines generally have eight syllables. In all but the act and last stanzas, the sec and last lines of each stanza have six syllables. The verse scheme is regular, with the second and last lines rhyming and the three lines in mingled with rhyming with each other. The meter is very irregular, with accents falling on several(predicate) syllables. This quality was possibly inspired by the folk music of Hardys time. Another musical quality of this poem is that there is a refrain Ah, Are You Digging On My Grave?In the second line, when the woman asks if the one digging is her loved one? planting repent? the word rue is a double entendre. Rue is a chaparral that symbolizes sorrow, so the corpse is really asking her loved one both(prenominal) if he is planting flowers on her grave and if he is feeling sorrow about her death. When the womans kin say N o tendance of her muckle can loose/ Her spirit from Deaths gin they are referring to a gin as in a type of bound or trap used to catch animals. There is synecdoche in the phrases the brightest riches has bred in the first stanza and one true heart was left loafer in the fifth stanza. This poem also uses a lot of irony.The woman-corpse wants to recollect that her former acquaintances remember her and are affected by her death, but she continually finds out that the opposite is true they have little concern for her straightway that she is dead. Hardy uses personification with the corpse and the dog. He gives them human traits like the cleverness to speak and feel emotions. When the dog is burying a bone on his dead mistresss grave, it symbolizes how the people she knew while she was alive flat view her. To them, she is just a bunch of bones buried in the ground, and no longer of any importance.The central theme of this poem is that no love or hate outlasts death. There is a lo t of dashing hopes in the poem, depicting death and the afterlife as tragic things. The total darkness humor and irony reveals a sad message the dead woman is forgotten and eternally lonely. The poem is also satiric, mocking the sentimentalism of continual faithfulness to the dead. Hardy takes a similar stance as the Feste in twelfth part Night.