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In a Disused Graveyard

1874 –

1963

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never any more the dead.

The verses in it say and say:
“The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.”

So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?

It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 28, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

One of the most celebrated figures in American poetry, Robert Frost was the author of numerous poetry collections, including New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923). Born in San Francisco in 1874, he lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont. He died in Boston in 1963.

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About this Poem

“In a Disused Graveyard” appears in Robert Frost’s collection New Hampshire (Henry Holt & Company, 1923). In “Robert Frost, Humorist,” published in The Robert Frost Review, no. 1 (Fall, 1991), Sandra L. Katz, professor emerita of English at the University of Hartford, writes, “The speaker decides to tell the stones that the reasons why the graveyard is ‘disused’ is that ‘Men hate to die / And have stopped dying now forever.’ The persona is playing a joke on the stone, but one that we—perhaps foolishly—wish were true.” Similarly, in “Technique and the Sense of Play in the Poetry of Robert Frost,” published in Frost: Centennial Essays II (University Press of Mississippi, 1976), Walton Beacham, director of creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, notes the poem’s “lighthearted spookiness which, like a haunted mansion, makes us only ostensibly afraid [. . .]. In ‘In a Disused Graveyard’ there is a certain playfulness, and its meter and personification make it somewhat ironic, but not to the extent it might have been had the middle stanzas not weakened [the ironic effect].”

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A Line-storm Song

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,
And the hoof-prints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
And be my love in the rain.

Robert Frost

1913

Not to Keep

They sent him back to her. The letter came
Saying... and she could have him. And before
She could be sure there was no hidden ill
Under the formal writing, he was in her sight—
Living.— They gave him back to her alive—
How else? They are not known to send the dead—
And not disfigured visibly. His face?—

Robert Frost

2018

A Time to Talk

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,

Robert Frost

1916

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In a Disused Graveyard

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