At first cock-crow the ghosts must go Back to their quiet graves below.

The couplet draws on a long folkloric motif: supernatural visitations are bounded by night and must retreat at dawn, often signaled by the cock’s crow. The line suggests a moral and psychological boundary as much as a temporal one—darkness permits fear, memory, and the uncanny to surface, but daylight restores ordinary order. “Quiet graves below” emphasizes the proper place of the dead and the living’s need for separation from them. Read more broadly, the verse can be taken as a reminder that troubling thoughts and hauntings—whether literal or metaphorical—lose their power when confronted by clarity, routine, and the “morning” of reason.