Mark Jarman's Questions For Ecclesiastes

What if you were called to a home in the middle of the night where a young girl had committed suicide? Would you be able to comfort her grieving parents? Walk into the girl’s room to see where she had committed the act? Could you tell them that God was there in their time of need? Could you then go home to your small child and still have strength left? In Mark Jarman’s poem “Questions for Ecclesiastes”, his father had to do just that. Jarman uses a narrative style of poetry to question God’s will and how words fall short in times of tradgy. Jarman uses a lot of questions in the poem to question God’s will in the death of the young girl who took her life in the poem. In the second stanza, he points out that although the girl is no longer there,

“the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing,” (13-14), “the dead know not anything for the memory of them is forgotten?” (39-40), “live joyfully all the days of the life of thy vanity, that is thy portion in this life?” (59-60). These words are to be words of comfort, but they fall short. In the seventh stanza, Jarman describes how the preacher is overcome with emotion when the parents show him their daughter’s room, “What if an act of mercy so acute it pierced the preacher’s skull and travels the length of his spine…” (49-50). This was a realization for the preacher that he could not say anything to truly comfort the

His use of imagery really helps set the stage for the poem. “What if on a foggy night in a beach town, a night when the Pacific leans close like the face of a wet cliff…” (1-2). He sets up an eerie mood for the rest of the poem, one of gloom. He describes the girls suicide in a blunt way, “… where a child had discharged a rifle through the roof of her mouth and the top of her skull?” (3-5). He does not leave much to the imagination, just bluntly says what happens. This helps the reader realize what the preacher is coming into. The style he chooses was important to how he told the story. He divided the poem into paragraph-style stanzas. Also, the poem changes tenses, starts in past tense and ends in the present, this shows use Jarman is reflecting on what happened in the poem towards the end. Six of the stanzas starts with “What if,” and the final stanza refers to “a secret” kept by God, these represent Jarman wrestling with God’s