Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave

Thomas Hardy

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1913

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Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Cultural/Historical Context

Although published in the early decades of the 20th century (1913), “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?” can be interpreted as an ironic response to the sometimes-overwrought culture surrounding death during the Victorian Era (1837-1901) that dominated much of Hardy’s life.

In Victorian England, mourning was elevated almost to an art form, with various complicated rituals surrounding the rites of death and grieving. The Victorians were not particularly squeamish about death: One notorious practice, known as “post-mortem photography,” involved taking photos of the corpses of loved ones who had recently died, for commemoration and display. Open viewings of the body in the casket during funerals were commonplace, with loved ones often kissing the hands or face of the deceased while paying their respects. Grief was regarded as something that should be ostentatious and lengthy in duration: Upper and middle class widows were expected to dress in gradually lessening degrees of black and avoid remarrying for a prescribed period of time, sometimes last up to several years. Men often wore black arm bands or other signs of mourning along with their daily attire during the mourning period as well.

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These strict and intensive rituals could often render mourning mawkishly sentimental or even fetishized, including in the literature of the time (See Literary Context). In “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?” Hardy takes a darker and less reverent attitude towards the subject of death and memory, as the poem’s dead speaker discovers that those she left behind no longer mourn her and are all eager to move on with their lives. The poem is a sign of changing attitudes towards death and grieving—the lengthy mourning periods of the Victorians would soon give way to more practical, private, and sometimes cynical rituals of the post-WWI era.

Literary Context

Death—particularly untimely death—was a favorite theme of Hardy’s Victorian fellow authors. The death of young women in their prime was a special object of fascination, often depicted in a highly stylized fashion, as in Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” (1842) or in the sentimental death scenes in Charles Dickens’s novels. Poets wrote often upon the themes of death and mourning, and sometimes even imagined their own deaths, as Christina Rossetti does in “When I Am Dead, My Dearest” (1862).

By choosing to write of death in a more ironic and detached way in “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?” Hardy offers a different perspective on the theme. Instead of romanticizing death, he emphasizes its banality: The world moves on, and even those who once had strong feelings towards the deceased gradually (and unapologetically) lose the intensity of this connection. While the Gothic genre in Victorian literature often attributed enduring power and presence to the deceased in the form of ghosts—as in the famously death-defying love of Catherine and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)—Hardy’s dead speaker is a lonely and vulnerable figure—confined to the grave, unable to identify passers-by, and left helplessly waiting for someone to come and visit her. In Hardy’s poem, death has lost its power and terror—and with it, something of its meaning and emotional weight as well.