In his poem, "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?" by Thomas Hardy, the poet challenges western society's conventional beliefs about death. Aparna Zambare writes in Library Journal that in this work, as in some of Hardy's other poetry, the dead still have a voice. In the poem the deceased is a woman who, at the opening of the poem, senses a shifting in the earth above her grave. The poem opens with the corpse asking who is digging at her gravesite and for what reason. In this poem, Hardy challenges normal sensibilities about death, about respect for the dead, about the permanence and immutability of death. Hardy shows a strong central idea: relationships are tenuous. For Hardy, the natural world chaotic and any connections to the natural world are even more fleeting than a connection to another human being. This inability to fully connect with others causes disappointment and a feeling of isolation (Zambare 150).
The narrator asks who is digging at her grave and receives some unexpected responses. She thinks it might be her husband visiting the grave and planting flowers. Hardy tells us her husband is no where to be found. To him, his wife is dead and gone and he has remarried to a woman who is wealthy. Hardy notes that "wealth has bred." Hardy implies that the first marriage to the deceased was for love but that this second marriage is for money. Not only has the beloved forgotten his dead loved one, he may have found someone even "better."
The narrator then turns away from the idea of romantic love towards familial love. The narrator feels disillusioned because of her husband's reaction to her death. The narrator hopes that her family, her kin, might have come to visit and to tend to her grave. The speaker digging at the grave relates that the family has not come to the site, for they feel the tending of her burial place to be useless. Her family believes that nothing will alter the fact she has died. They feel th...