Is this not treating poems as children treat cakes--picking out the almonds to crunch and giving the rest to the dog?' My friend," I went on, "was perhaps offended by finding in here what Daniel Webster might call the 'dishonored fragments' of his own 'search(es) for the inexplicable' (Wallace Stevens, requiescat in pace), or perhaps it was his conviction that all too much of what distinguishes the Fourteenth Edition from the Thirteenth 'is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another, the stripping of two or three anthologies as one might empty convenient tombs ('Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at
loggats with them?
The baroque sentiment of Hamlet's banter with the gravediggers in Shakespeare's play, simultaneously morbid and mocking--a commentary on both the brevity and the pointlessness of human life--is similar to Pushkin's tone in the first part of "Kogda za gorodom": Pushkin's rotting corpses crowded together in a swamp (boloto), his merchants, bureaucrats, and old cuckolds housed in slimy graves (mogily slizkie) yawning open (zevaiuchi) for new dead are reminiscent of Shakespeare's courtier now kept by Lady Worm whose "bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at
loggats with them" and the purported lawyer "[knocked] about the sconce with a dirty shovel," not to mention, of course, the court jester Yorick who is now reduced to a garish skull.