The Digging Skeleton

I In the anatomical plates displayed on the dusty quays where many a dry book sleeps mummified, as in ancient days, drawings to which the gravity and skill of some past artist, despite the gloomy subject have communicated beauty, you’ll see, and it renders those gruesome mysteries more complete, flayed men, and skeletons posed, farm-hands, digging the soil at their feet. II Peasants, dour and resigned, convicts pressed from the grave, what’s the strange harvest, say, for which you hack the ground, bending your backbones there, flexing each fleshless sinew, what farmer’s barn must you labour to fill with such care? Do you seek to show – by that pure, and terrible, emblem of too hard a fate! – that even in the bone-yard the promised sleep’s far from sure: that even the Void’s a traitor: that even Death tells us lies, that in some land new to our eyes, we must, perhaps, alas, forever, and ever, and ever, eternally, wield there the heavy spade, scrape the dull earth, its blade beneath our naked, bleeding feet?