Death: concepts, causes, and cultural perspectives

¶ … Death in Poetry

Ruba

Poetry is an effective form of literature wherein the significance and importance of human experience are depicted. Life as people perceive and live it are the most common issues and topics used in poetry, although death is becoming a dominant topic in contemporary poetry because of its enigmatic and subjective quality. Death has many meanings for people: death can be an escape, relief, punishment, pain, suffering, or a meaningless void in a person's life. These different depictions of death will be discussed in the analyses of 5 poems wherein the theme of death is used.

Emily Dickinson's poem entitled, "Death" is a poem that talks about the futility of Man's greatness after death. The poem illustrates two dead people who had been known for their beauty (character 1) and a champion for the truth (character 2). Although these people had been great in their previous lives, Dickinson illustrates how Death is the master of all people's lives, wherein no amount of greatness or wealth can prevent it. Thus, Dickinson ends her poem by saying, "We talked between the rooms / Until the moss had reached our lips / And covered up our names."

Thomas Hardy's "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave" is a comic illustration of a dead rich woman who was not able to establish true, close relations with the people around her probably because of her cruelty and the greediness of the people around her. The dead woman thinks of the possible people who might care 'to dig her grave,' a symbol representing the memory of the dead woman. She names her husband, her immediate relatives, and enemy, all of whom show through their reflections that she had been a cruel and unworthy person to be remembered by her loved-ones. Finally, Hardy adds a comic relief to the woman's death by using the dog, which, in contrast to the dead woman's assumption that it was digging her grave, stated, " I dug upon your grave / To bury a bone... I am sorry, but I quite forgot / It was your resting-place."

A.E. Housman's depiction of death in "Eight O' Clock" shows a man's countdown to death, using the title "Eight O'clock" as the dreaded time of the man who was "Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour," illustrating his position as a prisoner condemned to death. The last line saying "... The clock collected in the tower / Its strength, and struck," shows the power of time in determining a person's death, thereby establishing the relationship of time as one crucial element in the determination of death.

Philip Larkin's "Next, Please" illustrates the nature and effect of death upon the people in the society. Larkin treats death as a process wherein people will all go through, and instead of giving death immense significance and meaning to people, he instead characterizes it as a phase in people's lives with no causal effect to other people at all ("Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks / Of disappointment...").