Unveiling

     I picked this poem to read and blog on, not because we studied it this past week in class, but because I am currently in Wisconsin for the funeral of my grandmother as I write this. I found this poem ironically haunting to be studying in class the day following my grandmother's passing, so I thought it suited my blogging this poem this week.
     As I was walking through the cemetery yesterday afternoon at the burial proceeding, I saw the head stone where my preceding grandfather's head lay, and I walked the line of the headstones--my my great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, all following in line of the same sort of deceased meeting ground among the branches of the tree that continues to stretch further as my family continues growing (quite wordy, I know). As I walked this line, I was eerily reminded of this haunting poem that I had previously read in AP Literature. As my grandma was the last sort of grandparent to die on my father's side, it seemed that the great-greats, great, and normal grandparents were commencing, once again, in their rituals as the poem dictates, as sitting around the dinner table, enjoying the newfound company of my grandmother which they had missed. But the rest of us were stuck here, that is, until we are received in the same earthen graves, looked down on by our lively children and grandchildren. But they are mortal. They, too, will become part of the family dinner table. But for now they must sit at the kids' table and wait patiently as their way comes 'round.
     It was not my full intention to write my own story about my own recollections, but I feel like that was what was necessary to greet the full meaning of this poem--to feel it, and then to retell it as your own legend, as I did see it.