Analysis Of Louise Glück's The Fear Of Burial

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When thinking of death, often one thinks of what might wait for them in any sort of afterlife they have come to believe in, or perhaps they envision not what they experience, but what their loved ones are left to feel after their passing. Less often does one pause to ponder what occurs between the moment of death and the burial of the body. The prevailing theory seems to be that within this time between “moving on” and death the spirit leaves the body and, while it may linger for a moment, the spirit quickly continues on to fulfill its existential desire. The few who have attempted to speculate about the body itself have never formed a theory in which the body is in a happy state. Often it is described as being afraid or alone, left to itself …show more content…

Humans have a natural aversion to any sort of change because they are creatures of habit and anything that could disrupt their already established routine or culture is generally met with resistance. The body, having experienced death has already made a permanent change, but the spirit of the deceased has not. Rather than leaving quickly after the time of death, the spirit stays with the body, sitting “beside it, on a small rock…” (3), seemingly unwilling to leave. Again, in the second stanza, the reader is met with the spirit’s desire to stay with what used to be its home when it takes the form of a shadow and wraps itself around the body. The spirit at this point in the poem knows that nothing will come “to give it form again…” (4) but still, tries to resist the inevitable change it must make in its “long journey” (8). This sort of behavior is typical of humans in the face of a permanent change. Despite the inevitability of such a permanent change as ‘moving on,’ the spirit still attempts to stay in its previous state of existence even though such a thing in impossible now that the body has

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