“Ah. Are You Diging On My Grave? ” by Thomas Hardy has six regular stanzas of six lines. which are written consecutive. The lines by and large have eight syllables. In all but the 2nd and last stanzas. the 2nd and last lines of each stanza have six syllables. The rhyme strategy is regular. with the 2nd and last lines riming and the three lines in between riming with each other. The metre is really irregular. with speech patterns falling on different syllables. This quality was perchance inspired by the common people music of Hardy’s clip. Another musical quality of this verse form is that there is a chorus: “Ah. Are You Diging On My Grave? ”

In the 2nd line. when the adult female asks if the one excavation is her “loved one? – seting herb of grace? ” the word ‘rue’ is a dual entendre. Rue is a bush that symbolizes sorrow. so the cadaver is truly inquiring her loved one both if he is seting flowers on her grave and if he is experiencing sorrow about her decease. When the woman’s kin say “No tendance of her hill can loose/ Her spirit from Death’s gin” they are mentioning to a gin as in a type of trap or trap used to catch animate beings. There is synecdoche in the phrases “the brightest wealth has bred” in the first stanza and “one true bosom was left behind” in the 5th stanza. This verse form besides uses a batch of sarcasm.

The woman-corpse wants to believe that her former familiarities retrieve her and are affected by her decease. but she continually finds out that the opposite is true: they have small concern for her now that she is dead. Hardy utilizations personification with the cadaver and the Canis familiaris. He gives them human traits like the ability to talk and experience emotions. When the Canis familiaris is burying a bone on his dead mistress’s grave. it symbolizes how the people she knew while she was alive now view her. To them. she is merely a clump of castanetss buried in the land. and no longer of any importance.

The cardinal subject of this verse form is that no love or hatred outlasts decease. There is a batch of letdown in the verse form. picturing decease and the hereafter as tragic things. The black wit and sarcasm reveals a sad message: the dead adult female is forgotten and everlastingly lonely. The verse form is besides satiric. mocking the sentimentalism of continual devotedness to the dead. Hardy takes a similar stance as the Feste in Twelfth Night.