Unvalued Bodies in Rosenberg's "Dead Man's Dump" and Hughes' "Ruby Brown"

The body can be viewed, imagined and represented in different ways depending on the society, context, gender, literary work, and much more. In Langston Hughes’ “Ruby Brown,” the body of Ruby Brown is at first thought of as a body of work, but as the poem progresses her body becomes a figure of pleasure. In “Dead Man’s Dump” by Isaac Rosenberg, the bodies of the soldiers are not appreciated, tossed away as if they are trash, and only used as a means to an end. Both poems correlate to the specific time period they were written in, and the poems symbolize the realities each individual situation the bodies are presented with. While both of these poems focus on similar aspects, the ways in which the bodies are ‘put to use’ are vastly different. Bodies in Rosenberg’s “Dead Man’s Dump,” and Hughes’ “Ruby Brown” are presented very differently in their respective poems, by means of imagery, context, subject but are both used and treated as a means to an end.

Rosenberg’s “Dead Man’s Dump” takes place during WWI, and like Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” this poem illustrates the realities and brutalities of death in war. The bodies that are being discussed are the bodies of fallen soldiers, who, like the title of the poem are tossed into a ‘dump’ with others that have died. This dump is not biased, nor is it only for specific soldiers: “[t]hey lie there huddled, friends and foeman” (Rosenberg 10), the dump is not discriminatory as to who it collects in death; it is for men of all colors, ranks, and sides.

The dump is essentially a death count of the war thus far: “[t]hey left this dead with the older dead, / Stretched at the cross roads” (Rosenberg 54-5) the new dead gets piled and thrown on top of the older dead, and the bodies are...

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...uby Brown” are both poems that view, imagine and represent bodies, they do so very differently. While both the soldiers and Ruby Brown are owned by their respective authorities, the soldiers’ only escape from war and brutality is death, while Ruby’s escape only leads her back into the hands of those she wishes to escape from, except in a different sexually explicit manner. Although both the bodies of the men in “Dead Man’s Dump” and the body of Ruby in “Ruby Brown” are presented very differently in their respective poems, the bodies in each poem are treated as a means to an end.

Works Cited

Hughes, Langston. Selected poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print.

Rosenberg, Issac. “Dead Man's Dump.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th

Ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy. New York: W.W.

Norton, 2005. Print.

Borden, Anne.