Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave

The dog’s bone in the poem’s sixth and final stanza is a symbol of the mundaneness and banality of death. When the speaker discovers the identity of her grave’s visitor, she is at first delighted, believing that her dog’s presence proves that animals have purer loyalty than humans do. However, the dog merely wanted to bury a bone for his “daily trot” (Line 34) by the gravesite. The importance of the dog’s bone is twofold. First, the dog’s concern with his bone instead of with the memory of his former owner furthers the poem’s themes of how banal death is and how fragile all forms of affection really are. Second, the fact that it is a bone is a rather cruel twist, as the bone the dog buries also brings to mind the decaying bones of the poem’s speaker, who is, after all, a buried skeleton. The dog’s bone also once belonged to a living creature, just as the speaker was once a living person who has now also been reduced to something mundane and irrelevant in the eyes of those she loved.