Death as the Good King’s Jest

Alan Watts once referenced a short poem that captures something profound about life and death. G.K. Chesterton’s The Skeleton ends with these lines:

Surely friends, I might have guessed

Death was but the good King’s jest,

It was hid so carefully.

Chesterton’s “good King” is the force behind all life, whether we call it God, the cosmos, or the eternal “I Am.” The jest is that death, the thing we fear most, is not what it appears. It is a trick hidden in plain sight. A doorway disguised as an ending.

Watts often spoke of life as a cosmic play, a game in which the self forgets its nature so it can rediscover it. In that game, death is simply the scene change. The skeleton is not the end of the actor. It is the mask removed.

To see death for what it is, is to see it as a promise. It is not grim, but a gentle closing of the curtain and the end of suffering.