Loneliness and Loss in Modern Poetry: Barth-Martinson and Alexie

Introduction: Two Poems on Loneliness and Loss

"Sister Buried in a Trunk" by Aaron Barth-Martinson evokes the loneliness of death and the fear that the living must encounter when death strikes down someone they love. In the poem, the narrator calls for Emily and begs her to come down to walk with him rather than die alone in her room. Sherman Alexie's "Facebook Sonnet" takes up a related but distinctly modern form of loneliness — the hollow socialization of digital life. Together, the two poems reveal how grief and isolation manifest in both intimate and public registers.

Allusion and the Resurrection of Poetry in 'Sister Buried in a Trunk'

The blank verse poem makes allusions to two famous Emilys of literature: Faulkner's Emily in "A Rose for Emily" and Emily Dickinson, the famous hermit poet who died virtually unknown, with all of her poems unpublished beneath her bed. The allusion to Faulkner's Emily is made in the poem's last line — "I shed a tear for Emily" — as the narrator mourns the recluse. The allusion to Dickinson appears in the lines referring to the poems found in the trunk: "I found a trunk full / Of slanted verse / And I was no longer falling." These lines also reflect on the resurrecting power of poetry.

Emily, who has died, has left a little piece of herself for posterity in the form of her writing. The narrator, just as happened with Emily Dickinson, finds the poems, reads them, and feels his sister returned to him. Poetry, the poem suggests, is one of the few human acts capable of reaching across death.

The Paradox of the Second Death

The narrator is conflicted about publishing his sister's work: "After I made your work immortal, / You died again, in my grief." The sense is that by sharing her with the world, he has lost her a second time. What he wanted was to keep her close in intimacy — but he also wanted to make her known to others. Thus the narrator mourns twice: first for the physical death of his sister, and then for a second death through fame when he makes her works "immortal."

The irony of the second death gives the poem its greatest emotional weight. The narrator, hoping to find peace through the act of publication, remains haunted and still dreams that he sees his sister's shadow in the window. The very gesture meant to honor her — and to recover her — becomes another form of loss.

Alexie's 'Facebook Sonnet' and the Irony of Digital Loneliness

Sherman Alexie's "Facebook Sonnet" is equally chilling and alludes to the ironic loneliness that underscores every Facebook profile and every act of Facebook socialization. Everyone's private life is on display as though to fill some emptiness within each individual who seeks to compensate by putting themselves before an audience on a social networking site. There, Alexie writes, people build an altar to themselves: "Let's sign up, sign in, and confess / Here at the altar of loneliness." Everyone, he laments, is living a superficial, artificial dot-com life — one that is nothing real or genuine, which only deepens the ironic loneliness of the Facebook existence.

Alexie's choice of the sonnet form is itself an act of irony. What has historically been poetry's primary vehicle for expressing love — think of Shakespeare's love sonnets — is here repurposed as a vehicle for grief. The formal contrast between the poem's traditional shape and its modern, digital subject matter mirrors the hollowness it describes.