All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave

The opening lines’ assertion of debt to the dead seemingly promises some moribund meditation on every mortal’s fatal portion to the cosmos—a debt that can not be settled. However, rather than surrender to the debt, the speaker flips that perception to suggest that the more expansive a person’s ancestry, the more vibrantly alive the person should feel: I am flesh and blood and bound to die, yes! Part of an ever-resilient organic universe, the speaker finds in his inevitably death-bound body a cause to celebrate the now. He enjoins himself to engage the hunger of the flesh, to relish the intricacies of the heart—not because but despite that he must die.

In his proposed logic for acknowledging death, the speaker rejects by omission the idea of a soul. His mortal incarnation is his ancestral legacy. His radiant sense of human oneness and consanguinity is unfettered to an individual soul that will, after bodily death, be subjected to the hard-eyed scrutiny of some divine bookkeeper: “O all I owe is all the flesh inherits” (Line 5). Far from occasioning despair, his mortality opens him up to a bracing epiphany that he is one with everyone. Lines 6-9 dismiss that individual experiences are exclusive or isolating. Rather, those experiences fuse the speaker to humanity itself. He is animated by his ancestors’ same curiosities and vulnerable to the same catastrophes. He is “heir to the telling senses that alone / Acquaint the flesh with a remembered itch” (Lines 14-15). The inheritance is not to be squandered.

Far from recoiling from such solidarity, the speaker invokes his cosmic station with an exultant gesture toward the sun. In the closing lines of the middle stanza, the speaker affirms the timeless reality of humanity. This is no simplistic live-in-the-moment hedonism. In his heart, he says, he carries with him both the urgency of love and the gravity of death. He is one with young lovers “dying on a kiss” (Line 18) as well with “children who were suckled on a plague” (Line 17). Life and death, love and lust are “sown” (Line 20) into his very breath.

The poem resembles a hypothesis: The first two stanzas set up the conditional (“if”), and the closing stanza provides the consequent (“then”). The poem closes with the inevitable conclusion. He demands of himself to look at his life through the dead’s perspective—what he calls his “periscopes right sighted from the grave” (Line 24). Death affirmed becomes a rebirth: The speaker’s mortal flesh ceases to be a death shroud, “[w]ax clothes that wax upon the aging ribs” (Line 26) (a reference to how the traditional shroud would be wrapped around the dead and sealed loosely with candle wax). He challenges himself rather to look to his heart—that “scarlet trove” (Line 28)—and feel its steady mutiny.

He tells himself (and by extension the reader) not to live as if he is the “falling wheat” (Line 29) already strewn dead about the mill floor; the speaker’s grain is still on the stem, still growing. He looks to death and understands its inevitability, but reminds himself to delay the shroud, to not let his precious “fortune” slumber in the winding sheet (Line 30). The argument is nonrational, childlike in its wholehearted, even playful embrace of death as a reason—really the sole reason—to live.