Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave

“Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?” is a lyrical ballad by the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). The poem first appeared in print in the pages of the Saturday Review in 1913, and was included in Hardy’s poetry collection Satires of Circumstance: Lyrics and Reveries with Miscellaneous Pieces (1914). The lyrical ballad takes the form of a dialogue between a woman speaking from beyond the grave to an unknown visitor at her gravesite, in which the deceased speaker tries to guess who could be visiting her and why. The poem’s streak of dark irony and the touch of melancholy in its themes of death and forgetting are reminiscent of much of Hardy’s poetry, which tends to combine elegance of form and style with heavy subject matter. While Hardy is best known as a novelist for famous works such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Jude the Obscure (1895), Hardy’s poetry remains highly regarded in its own right.

Poet Biography

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in the countryside of Dorset, England, and was the first of four children.