Robert Frost on a Disused Graveyard

In A Disused Graveyard


The living come with grassy tread 

To read the gravestones on the hill; 

The graveyard draws the living still, 

But never anymore 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.

--Robert Frost