As Cohen suggests poetry like your deeds is what remains you will ever have, suggesting a final immortality for those penned in verse. Poetry is a robust literary device that endeavours to showcase emotive feelings and words to provoke thought and reflection on life itself. Throughout history poets have created wonderful works of "ash" for audiences around the world. A poet's cultural background, social upbringing and philosophy will affect the diversity of the type of poetry that is written. One's thoughts via poetry may become a robust tool that inspires and reflects an age or explores quite concepts of humanity. The concept of death, and so its reflection on life, is a common discourse explored in poetry. This essay will discuss all of the attitudes to death immortalised through poetry and argue that poetry about death is really as much about life. SHOULD I MENTION THE POEMS HERE?
'Death' is a prevalent theme in many poetic pieces and plays a vital role in representing an array of emotions and attitudes towards death. Culturally, there are diverse attitudes to death. Poetry represents a medium in which poets can display their views on death and record that they personally have been influenced by death. Reading poetry about death shouldn't be described as sinister or gloomy, but should be viewed as a tool to better understand or even manage such a tragic but inevitable phenomena. Poetry can be written in a number of forms to raised represent the idealistic views of the poet; the most frequent forms include sonnets, eulogy and lyrical poems.
Poems penned about death also affirm attitudes alive. Poetry tells the reader that even after death there may be continuation of life; it lives in the thoughts and actions of others. Writing about death can be used by the poet to relate deep sorrow or fear, to determine deaths true meaning or to give mortality to the very subject dying. Poetry gives immortality to loved ones. Poets such as Donne, Dylan Thomas, John Blight, Emily Dickinson, Slessor and Michelle Williams explore the contradiction of life and death through losing someone you care about, personifying death and the disastrous ramifications of war and terrorism.
John Donne (1572 - 1631) is today described as one of the masters of Metaphysical poets. His poetry and lyrics is often dramatic but is marked with freshness and exuberance. One of his major literary pieces 'Death be not proud, though some have called thee' is a sonnet confronting the power of death over man and perhaps death's own mortality.
The interesting language differs to modern poets such as Emily Dickinson or Kenneth Slessor due to the time in which Donne wrote; old English was the normal language. Interestingly, this sonnet is written in a very controlled form, for a subject that no-one has direct control over. Unusually, Donne directly addresses Death as if it is a character personifying many of its attributes.
In the first line 'DEATH be not proud, ' the term death is bolded and capitalised to draw the reader's attention to the prevalent theme of the poem. Through the entire poem Donne is anthropomorphizing death, discussing it as an equal while on the latter half of the sonnet he starts to realise what is so important and frightening about death. Donne's attitude to death is not about fear but about speaking out against death and suggesting to the reader that death is not the finish point of one's life.
Line 9 'Thou art slave to fate, Chance, kings and desperate men, ' Donne further reflects that death is not as powerful or controlling as first regarded as. The personified death is a 'slave' to fate, chance, kings and desperate men. Death will not choose who dies; fate and chance plays the most vital role as well as kings and desperate men. Death is not in charge of itself. Through the entire poem Donne utilises numerous poetics devices such as juxtaposition, 'mighty and dreadful' to display the insignificance from what death happens to be. The poem concludes with 'one short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, And death shall be forget about; death thou shalt die. ' These last two lines bears witness to the theme that death will not win because people sleep and wake eternally alluding to our eternal existence. The irony of 'death, thou shalt die', showcases that death should hesitate, and not the main one to be feared.
Another poem that exhibits the underlying theme of raging against death is Welsh poet Dylan Thomas's (1914 - 1953) 'Do not go gentle into that good night. ' Dylan Thomas writes from his heart as he directly addresses his dying father, who was simply an important influence throughout his life. He constantly showcases poetry that exhibits the themes of the cycle of life and death and like Donne uses a simple form to provide such a complex message.
The first tercet introduces the poem's theme while also introducing the alternating couplet that ends each stanza. In the first stanza Thomas' theme of resisting death is evident as well as the first line contrasting with the third line. Gentle images are juxtaposed with the repetition of "rage" urging a furious resistance to death. Thomas is almost commanding his father to "not go gentle, but to rage, rage against the dying of the light". Another 3 stanzas then provide evidence as to the reasons his father should not give up so easily on life and to fight death as there exists more living to do.
Thomas discusses different classes of men, "graven men, good men, wise men, gentle men, wild men" who never quit, but in his last paragraph he talks to his own father. Death can be faced with fear. Within the last stanza he repeats the lines 'do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage resistant to the dying of the light' to leave the reader with the steady theme outlined throughout the poem. His message is the fact that he wants visitors to fight against death.
Much like Donne, Thomas explicitly pleads to his father to not let death win, to fight against it. "Usually do not go gentle into that good night" has a constant rhyming scheme and uses many types of alliteration (rage, rage), oxymorons (blinding sight), similes (like meteors) and repetition.
MAYBE HERE DETECT THE OXYMORONS OR CONTRASTS AND THE METAPHORS OF LIGHT AND DAY TO REPRESENT LIFE AND DEATH.
Australian poet John Blight (1953 - 1973) writes about death in a completely different style to the previous two poets. Like Donne, Blight uniformly runs on the sonnet "Death of any Whale" that handles some facet of the sea and then progresses to more universal implications about death in the final lines. Unlike John Donne and Dylan Thomas, Blight writes about the human capacity for compassion and grief when met with death.
The sonnet begins with the alternating contrast of an 'tiny, delicate' mouse and a massive whale to determine how human compassion and grief is heavily determined pretty much by size. The mouse sparks a little sense of grief inside our hearts but then is overturned by the 'lugubrious death of a whale' even though grief is more a sense of curiosity. The rhetorical question 'How must a whale die to wring a tear?' is asked by the poet, which of course there is absolutely no answer for. However, the poem then requires a wild turn as 'Pooh! Pooh! Spare us, give us the death of an mouse, ' as the crowd realises the smell of the whale suggesting onlookers would actually prefer a mouse to possess died in a little hole where no person would notice. Within the last two lines of the sonnet the reader witnesses a devastating change of mood to 'when a kid dies: but at the immolation of any race who cries?" The poet now asks its reader to consider, arguably the Holocaust in World War 2. Blight is accusing the general populace to be uncaring, and cleverly compares it to the death of any mouse and a whale. Blight tortures the inhuman heart of the individual, making an emotional and intellectual impact on the reader in final couplet, suggesting too little compassion, perhaps a numbness to the destruction of a whole race.
Blights poem also utilises many poetry devices such as similes, 'like a door ajar from a slaughterhouse, ' provides a powerful image for the reader. AGAIN TRY AND WEAVE THIS IN
It is obvious that when writing about the destruction of war, death too becomes a focal point of war poetry. Poems such as "Dead Man's dump" by Isaac Rosenberg, "Homecoming" by Bruce Dawe and "Beach Burial by Kenneth Slessor document attitudes to war and the impact of death on loved ones. Australian poet Kenneth Slessor tackles the frightening images of death in war in his literary verse 'Beach Burial. ' The word 'beach' is often associated with a happy and joyful connotation, but once Slessor links it with the term 'burial', is prepared for something gloomy to check out. War is usually a place of grief and death which is heavily portrayed in Slessor's poem. The gruesome horrors and imagery of death is outlined in "Beach Burial".
While reading "Beach Burial" the reader knows a variety of sound files from the softness of the opening adverbs to the sad onomatopoeia of the famous image 'the sobs and clubbing of the gunfire. ' Addititionally there is the blatant alliteration of 'convoys. . . . come' and 'bury them in burrows' adding to the sound files. Metaphors such as 'as blue as drowned men's lips' and personification like 'breath of the wet seasons' is littered throughout the poem displaying Slessor's diverse range of literary devices and heightening the readers sense of death to come. Unlike the other poems, "Beach Burial" utilises all areas of poetry devices to display the importance of the war and the prevalent theme of death but lacks any manipulated rhyming scheme.
The first line of "Beach Burial" is a warm and friendly introduction into the poem with the line 'softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs' but then the confronting truth hits the reader, 'The convoy of dead sailors come. ' Burial or death is often symbolised with a cross above the grave; Slessor uses the image of a cross 'the driven stake of tidewood' to display a confronting image. The theme of the poem is vividly presented within the last stanza with the brutal undeniable fact that the sailors finally did find landfall, both enemy and ally found the same landfall, a death bed. Both sides of the war are actually 'enlisted' as you, combined by death, they may be peacefully united. This poem is an indictment of death and war and the horror of it.
Elegies are a poetic form which in their dedication to the dead offers certain immortality. Michelle Williams, female Australian poet writes about death from an extremely touching, true to life point of view. Her recent poem "Elegy for Bali" is a dedication to the victims of the Bali bombings and the grief which remains. Bali is often regarded as sunny beaches and an extremely popular tourist destination, not really a sight of death.
In the first stanza of the elegy, the reader has already been bombarded with poignant phrases that surround the theme of death. Sadness for 'those who mourn, . . . . burdened by the pain of dawn' describes the unrelenting pain which continues to rise, day in day trip.
In the last two stanzas the poet takes a dramatic twist with a shift in mood. No more is the reader hit with emotions of sadness, death or destruction but comforted by love, hope and honour. 'Nurture seeds for peace on Earth, ' is the concluding line that signals growth; with death, life always appears.
CONCLUSION
