To The Mercy Killers By Dudley Randall Summary

Life can be seen as something precious and special. Life is a privilege to live, yet many take living for granted. In Dudley Randall’s “To the Mercy Killers”, a person, who is presumably a man, is speaking to a mercy killer. A mercy killer is a person who decides on whether a terminally ill patient should be put out of their misery or if he or she would be better off moving on in life. Taking this into consideration, the reader can guess that the man speaking is a terminally ill patient who may have to face a mercy killer sometime soon. Through persona and voice of the character, the poetic language that Randall uses, and the sounds structure of the poem, Randall shows what this patient is thinking. Because even though the character maybe very sick and on the brink of death, every life is worth living until the end.

Every life is worth living can be felt through the persona and tone of the short poem. The persona is assumed to be a male by the way the patient speaks, his vocabulary, as well as the

The person speaking is a patient who may face death earlier than he or she wants to. In this poem, Randall uses Persona and tone to tell about how the patient is more than “a mute shelf of glucose, bottled blood, machinery to swell the lung and pump the heart” (11-13). The patient wants to live and will keep pleading for his life because it is his life to live, not someone’s to take away. Next Randall used poetic language to list all the negative things that the patient is all while the human sense s a visual for the reader. Lastly, sound and structure bring the poem in and give it time. This feeling of time shows that all lives are based on time and it is his or her story and life to tell, no someone else's. No matter how the odds may look for someone terminally ill, every life is worth living and no one should have a say when someone's life should