Products

About

©2018 StudyMode.com

Death in poetry

Topics: Poetry, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy Pages: 2 (1301 words) Published: October 28, 2014

Death. There is no other topic in all of literature that can draw out such meaningful and complicated emotions from different people all over the world. Death to some people can be a time of spiritual revival, a time of gathering and even, in some cases, a time for celebration. But for others, death can lead to a time of deep mourning and sadness and a time to reflect on oneself and how you view the word death. So its no coincidence then, that poets such as Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, Frank O’Connor, and Thomas Hardy, have tried to describe and analyze death through the use of poetry. Poetry is one unique way for ordinary people to think about, get a better grasp on and respond to death in their everyday lives. “War Is Kind,” “The Man He Killed,” “Because I Could Not stop For Death,” and “Guests of the Nation” through the use of irony, diction, and personification show how each individual author not only self- interpreted the deeper meaning, but also their own personal definition behind the word death, and what it means to them. In “War Is Kind” there are two speakers, one of which is using irony to describe the cruelty of war, and one who seems to be a higher-ranking officer urging his men to fight in the “glory” of battle. You can easily tell that the two speakers throughout the poem view the soldiers’ deaths differently then one another because of the change in the diction between the two of them. For example the narrator of the first stanza says, “Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky/ and the affrighted steed ran on alone,/ do not weep/ war is kind” (Crane 511). This point of view on death presents it ironically as a kind thing, although the author was just describing the soldier being killed and his horse running off without him. In the next stanza, the speaker says in a very harsh and pompous manner, Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,

Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained...

Bibliography: Crane, Stephen. “War is Kind” Diyanni. 511
Dickinson, Emily. “Because I could not stop for Death” Diyanni. 541
Hardy, Thomas. “The man he killed” Diyanni. 545
O’Connor, Frank. “Guests of the Nation” Diyanni. 51
Continue Reading

Please join StudyMode to read the full document

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Treatment of Death in Dicken's Poetry Essay

    ...Eng-437 091-114-022 11 Dec., 2011 Death in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry Poetry; most of the time depends on the poet’s personal life. His/her experiences in life are reflected through the words of poetry. Emily Dickinson lived most of her life within private world. Because of this life of solitude, she was able to focus on her world more sharply than others authors of her time were. She treated death in a different way with the use of imagery and metaphor; these were taken from her observations and imagination. She used simple language and paid attention to things that nobody else noticed in the universe. She was obsessed with death and its consequences especially the idea of eternity. Life’s most fascinating features to Dickinson were contingency of death, awe, wonder and endless questions. If anyone examine Dickinson’s poems one can see that Dickinson’s point to death as the final inevitable change. One thing is evident in her poetry that she was curious to learn about the intensity of dying person and their experience at the point of mortality. The most important feature is that throughout her poetry Emily Dickinson searched for the knowledge of what lies beyond life and in the mysteries of death and immortality. Nearly 150 of Emily Dickinson’s poems begin with “I,” the speaker is probably...

    Read More
    1190 Words 5 Pages
  • Death Poetry Essay

    ...To Fear or Not to Fear- A Look at Death in Emily Dickinson’s “The Chariot” and Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” Is death something to be feared when it may be considered the only aspect during life that is inevitable? Interestingly, the speakers in two poems written by Emily Dickinson and Alan Seeger may not feel that this is the case. In Dickinson’s “The Chariot”, the feminine speaker compares succumbing to death as a chariot ride passing places she has been in her life, while the speaker in Seeger’s “I have a Rendezvous with Death” is a masculine speaker that is assumed to be a soldier fighting in the war and experiencing many close encounters with this morbid experience. Both poems together shed a light of acceptance of death into world that generally has been taught to fear it, but in different extremes. I will argue that time is the ultimate factor that contributes to the acceptance of one’s passing away. This will be shown through the comparison of the personas and literary devices in each poem, as Dickinson’s speaker, who has been dead for centuries, in comparison to Seeger’s speaker, who is anticipating his death, have slight differences in the way they perceive death. Personification is cleverly used in both poems to humanize death and differentiates the two poems because of the certain characteristics that each poet gives...

    Read More
    1068 Words 3 Pages
  • Poetry and Death Essay

    ..."Prospice" is a dramatic monologue written about a man's thoughts on his impending death. Browning was an ambitious poet who wrote with both great range and variety. Through the vividness of imagery, swiftness of movement, and notes of hope and courage, Browning expresses his optimistic outlook on death and the afterlife. Born in Camberwell, London, on May 7th, 1812, Browning inherited his scholastic tastes from his father-- a clerk in the Bank of England. Browning's personal life revolved around his relationship with the poet Elizabeth Barret, whom he secretly married in 1846. The pair resided in Italy until 1861, when Elizabeth passed away. This resulted in Browning leaving Italy with a heavy heart, and settling in London, where he continued his writing. The verse novel The Ring and the Book, which was written in the last few decades of his life, achieved Browning his true literary prestige. Although heart broken after his wife's death, Browning could be described as a congenial, gregarious man. In the words of William Sharp: "Everybody wished him to come and dine; and he did his utmost to gratify everybody. He saw everything; read all the notable books; [...] knew all the gossip of the literary clubs, salons and the studios; was a frequenter of afternoon tea-parties; and then, over and above it, he was Browning; the most profoundly subtle mind that has exercised itself in poetry since...

    Read More
    1209 Words 4 Pages
  • Death and Mortality in Poetry Essay

    ...Death and Mortality in Poetry P.Morgan ENG 125 Instructor Saake June 11, 2012 Death is a part of life. This is a cliché that has resonated throughout society since the beginning of time. Some hate the thought of dying and some welcome its tender relief, but whatever the feeling towards it Death still comes to everyone eventually. Two poems, in particular, speak of death very differently. In the poem Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson, Death is a courteous guide to a place of peace and tranquility. However, in Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas, death is something to fight and struggle against as long and as hard as possible until death finally overcomes. Both Dickinson and Thomas paint a picture of the end of life and death by the use of language, rhyme and vivid imagery though their interpretation of death differs greatly. In the poem Because I could not stop for Death, the main character is met by death on an ordinary day of “labor and leisure” (Dickinson 1890), busy with life she had no time to stop, so like a gentleman caller he stopped for her. After death stops for her they start on their way through her town to her grave. It is not until the end of the poem that the main character tells that she has been dead for...

    Read More
    1472 Words 4 Pages
  • Essay on Death

    ...Primarily speaking, the necessity of death penalty has been the prolonged clamour of victims' immediate family and relatives of these predators who demoralize and disrespect the life of their preys. A plea for justice has always been the battle cry of these innocent victims who impatiently wait the verdict of this bureaucratic delayed justice system. Moreover, some of these convicts are generally given life imprisonment which in the long run can be granted with parole; years after repayment, vengeance is once sought after by these criminals. Though this humane world has been able to give a glimmer of hope for these prodigal sons to repent for the acts committed, the financial backwash should also be taken into consideration. The need to construct more prisons and jails is growing in leaps and bounds and the hungry stomachs of these people have long been siphoning our economic budget. On the long run, the taxes we pay are feeding these lackadaisical convicts more than the benefits we accumulate For what we pay. The first established death penalty laws date back to the Eighteenth Century B.C. in the Code of King Hammurabi of Babylon, which codified the death penalty for 25 different crimes. The death penalty was also part of the Fourteenth Century B.C.'s Hittite Code; in the Seventh Century B.C.'s Draconian Code of Athens, which made death the only punishment for all crimes; and in the Fifth Century...

    Read More
    1250 Words 4 Pages
  • Themes in Poetry: Death Essay

    ..."Themes in Poetry: Death" There are many frequently occurring ideas in poetry. The basic message of a poem is called a "theme." All poems have a certain theme that they revolve around, such as love, nature, life, and confusion. In different poems by different poets, the same themes correlate with each other because they all revolve around the same subject matter. Although seen through different angles and viewpoints, the same message is present and intertwined within the poems. One of the most commonly used themes in poetry of various poets is the theme of death. There are many different aspects of death that can be written about, but still, all the poems connect in the fact that they are about death. For centuries, poets have been fascinated with death. The mystery of it is so intriguing to the writers. The uniqueness of it is that no one is sure what death is like, because the only way to find that out, obviously, is to actually die. It is an undiscovered secret that the poets can only guess and hypothesize about. Some write and wonder if their dead loved ones can still see and hear them or if they know what they are sorry for or think about their dying; such as in "Unforgotten" by Laurence Hope. "Lying alone, aside, do you ever think of me, left in the light, from the endless calm of your dawnless night?" The question of life after...

    Read More
    761 Words 2 Pages
  • Characterization of Death in Dickinson's Poetry Essay

    ...CHARACTERIZATION OF DEATH IN DICKINSON'S POETRY Emily Dickinson had a sad life full with tragic experiences and its influences on her poetry can be seen in most of her works. During her life, she struggled with traumatic effects of a succession of deaths and due to this situation she spend the later half of her years in grief. The tragic deaths of people close to Dickinson have affected her writing and style of expression, in which death became a persisting theme of her poetry. Even though most of her poems consist directly on the subject "death", she also used unusual ways to write about this theme, by writing about immortality as a state of consciousness in an everlasting present. A typical example can be seen in her poems "Because I could not stop for Death", "I heard a Fly buzz when I died" and "I died for Beauty but was scarce". Emily Dickinson wrote most of her poems for the period of sensitive apprehension during the civil war. Her poem, "Because I could not stop for Death", is a mischievous metaphor in which death is embodied as a man. The first lines of the poem "Because I could not stop for death / He kindly stopped for me—," (1-2) reflect that she is pending to meet death on his own conditions. Typically, death is described as with pessimistic associations, however,...

    Read More
    2166 Words 5 Pages
  • Death in Emily Dickinson's Poetry Essay

    ...THE SUBJECT OF DEATH, including her own death, occurs throughout Emily Dickinson’s poems and letters. Although some find the preoccupation morbid, hers was not an unusual mindset for a time and place where religious attention focused on being prepared to die and where people died of illness and accident more readily than they do today. Nor was it an unusual concern for a sensitive young woman who lived fifteen years of her youth next door to the town cemetery. Original Dickinson family gravestones Photo: Amherst College Archives and Special Collections Original Dickinson family gravestones at West Cemetery RELATED TOPICS: Emily Dickinson and Health Thomas Gilbert (Gib) Dickinson The Posthumous Discovery of Dickinson's Poems Domestic Labor in the Dickinson Family Households The poet’s death on 15 May 1886 came after two and a half years of ill health. From the time her nephew Gib died in October 1883 and she suffered a consequent “nervous prostration,” Dickinson became what her sister termed “delicate.” On two later occasions she experienced “blackouts,” and she was confined to bed for the seven months preceding her death. During the 1880s Dickinson also endured the loss of several close friends - Charles Wadsworth, Judge Otis P. Lord, and Helen Hunt Jackson - and several family members, including Gib and her mother. The effect of these strains, the symptoms of severe headache and nausea mentioned in...

    Read More
    782 Words 3 Pages

Popular Essays

Become a StudyMode Member

Sign Up - It's Free