Paraphrase of 2 Poems

Poetic Paraphrase of Two Poems of Early Death:

On the Death of Friends in Childhood" by Donald Justice and Ted Kossler's "A Child's Grave Marker"

To paraphrase a poem is to put the poem's essential, but figurative meaning into a clearer, concise, and more prosaic form. Some might deny that paraphrasing a poem can ever render the true meaning of a poem because poetic meaning, by definition, lies in the images chosen by the author, and the rhythms of language used to express that image. However, attempting to glean the philosophic truth and to tease out the construction of a poem, however imperfectly, can be useful for a student of poetry, even if the true greatness of the poem lies only within the text of the poem itself.

With this in mind, it may be said that both "On the Death of Friends in Childhood" by Donald Justice and Ted Kossler's "A Child's Grave Marker" can be characterized as poems on profound subjects, namely the young and untimely death of children. These poems attempt to shed light upon the profound and unanswerable moral quandary -- why are young people cut down before it seems time -- through the use of simple and striking images.

A paraphrase of "On the Death of Friends in Childhood" by Donald Justice might read that, those friends whom one knew in childhood will never take on an adult appearance, if one should meet them in heaven. For instance, if there is a literal heaven, the speaker or the reader of the poem will not see his or her dead childhood friends with beards or bald heads. The person, because he or she died in childhood, will resemble the child known in life, in this conception of heaven, in this imagination of the poet Justice. But because of this fact of age, the poet or the reader of the poem will meet this beloved childhood friend as a stranger. The dead children will be playing games with one another. The adult 'angel,' once a young friend, but now a grown-up, will not remember the beloved games of childhood, and will be filled with all of the memories and cares of maturity, of the life he or she has led since the death of the childhood friend. However, thematically, despite the poingnacy of the image of two old friends, both as shadows, but unable to really 'connect' even in the afterlife, the poem ends with an uplifting tone. The poet Donald Justice calls upon the reader to seek, in memory, the childhood self as well as to remember the childhood playmate.

Child's Grave Marker" by Ted Kooser takes a slightly more impersonal view of childhood loss and death. Kooser does not specifically recall a friend he lost in childhood. While it is true that Justice's poem is phrased in terms of general grief, and generalizes the death of the children in heaven to the experiences of both the poet and the reader, eschewing specificity for a general discussion of childhood games and beardless faces and full heads of young hair, the poet Ted Kooser gazes upon the stone of the child's grave. Kooser, rather than engaging in fantasy of what the child was like in life, or what will be in death, focuses on the Plaster-of-Paris construction that living human beings have constructed, in a vain effort to render their grief and the soul of the child into a concrete substance.