Posts

Showing posts from September, 2015
On "In a Disused Graveyard" Mordecai Marcus "In a Disused Graveyard" follows three poems that glance with various degrees of wistfulness at disappointed ideals that end in uncertainty or death. Here the speaker gently mocks people's unwillingness to die and gives stones the ability to see and say that death has ceased. The scene, however, is concrete: a New England graveyard no longer used because its community has faded. But visitors still come to read the tombstones, not out of affectionate attachment but out of curiosity. The attraction of these living by the dead emphasizes the contrast between vitality and arrest. The tombstones’ inscriptions speak of how those reading them must eventually join the dead. The tombstones' personification gently contrasts with their real incapacity, the speaker satirically focuses fear in the word "shrinking." At last he shifts voice and denies the kind of cleverness in which he has been engaging. He sp