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

The lines invoke a widespread piece of European folk belief: that supernatural visitations—ghosts, witches, or other night-wanderers—lose their power at dawn and must retreat when the rooster crows. The cock’s crow functions as a natural boundary-marker between night and day, disorder and ordinary life, the uncanny and the safe. Read as verse, the tight rhyme and sing-song cadence mimic a nursery charm, suggesting the quote may be meant to soothe fear by turning the terrifying into a predictable ritual: the dead may rise, but only temporarily, and daylight restores moral and physical order.