My reading of Stevie Smith's poem, GRAVE BY A HOLM-OAK, is fundamentally based upon an assumption that it holds an agnostic attitude towards a deaf mute universe that seems unwilling to provide the questioning poet/individual with any sort of answer. First of all, let us read the poem:

You lie there, Anna,
In your grave now,
Under a snow-sky,
You lie there now.

Where have the dead gone?
Where do they live now?
Not in the grave, they say,
Then where now?

Tell me, tell me,
Is it where I may go?
Ask not, cries the holm-oak,
Weep, says snow.

It is apparent that the master figure of speech that encapsulates the entire poem is an apostrophe in which the poet is addressing a deceased Anna who, according to the title, lies by a holm-oak.

In the first stanza, the poet seems so confident of what she states:

You lie there, Anna,
In your grave now,
Under a snow-sky,
You lie there now.

However, this above-referred to certainty begins to waver by the beginning of the second stanza:

Where have the dead gone?
Where do they live now?
Not in the grave, they say,
Then where now?

Evidently, the affirmativeness of the statements of the first quartet shades into the interrogative leaning of the second one. Moreover, it is worthy of notice that the only statement in the second stanza, i.e. not in the grave, they say, is by no means attributable to the poet, the "I" of the poem; rather, it is they who say.

The poet is obviously abiding by a questioning attitude as regards the facts of the afterlife; she has no idea as to where the dead are, in actual fact, residing: in their graves or somewhere else.

Having reached this juncture in my appreciation of the poem, one thinks one is justified to raise this very question: Why is the poet so preoccupied with the matter that she keeps bothering the late Anna who, one supposes, wishes to rest in peace?! Let us bear the question in mind and continue our scrutiny.

Tell me, tell me,

In terms of drama, this line can be taken to be the emotional "climax" of the poem; sinking in bewilderment, the seemingly tormented poet so urges the deceased Anna to encounter her with the transcendent facts of death. Shakespeare once defined death as: the undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns. In other words, the poet is addressing an inhabitant of the undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns. This renders her quest unattainable.

Back to the question that I have above posed: Why is the poet so preoccupied with the matter that she keeps bothering the late Anna?

Here comes the answer:

Is it where I may go?

Simply put, the poet is involved. She, too, is going to die, just as Anna, once for all, did. The poet is fully aware that the theme at stake is a universal one.

Ask not, cries the holm-oak,

Nature, seemingly being more experienced, exposes the absurdity of the poet's quest; Ask not is the answer that, once again, renders the poet's quest unattainable.

As a consequence, the "Weep" of the concluding line denotes not only the poet's grief over Anna's death, but also, more importantly, her grief over her/our predicament. We are all caught up in the inescapable meshes of the same cosmic web.