It is early morning and he walks alone. The iron gates, crusted with rust, clang in his wake. Fog washes over the tombstones in waves. His feet crunch upon the ground. The fog obscures his vision, but he could walk here blindfolded. This journey to the cemetery has become a routine, anticipated but not enjoyed. The call of a loon sails through the milky air; the sound ripples along his spine. He walks onward, head forced down, eyes riveted to the ground.
When he finds himself before the tombstone, something is different. A fresh spray of roses has been laid upon the grave. Kneeling down, he runs a finger along one rose, the blossom still curling with life. Pale petals drenched in dew, leaves like wax, thorns jagged and defiant. His eyes search the grave for a trace of this new intruder. He is curious but miffed; he had believed himself to be the only visitor here. He felt a sense of belonging with the grave, as though his own name should be scrawled beneath that of the deceased. He wishes that he had felt closer with the fleshless creature now sheltered within the grave. They had been friends and almost lovers, nearly united as one, all the fragments fitting together--but then the passing of time tore them in half. Where life has failed them, death is infinitely more skilled; it brings them unbearably close.
He brushes a hand across the tombstone, his fingertips tingling upon the engraved lettering. The name. The epitaph, banal and meaningless. The dates of birth and death--dates too close together for comfort, dates that stir murmurs in passersby. How tragic. Poor boy, to die so young. Those who had cared to know him never said so, only the strangers.
Dawn light peeks through the sky’s gray latticework. The sun awakens ...
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...ecause of her, he can try.
This boy, dead at nineteen, that he both loves and despises… he is a shard of bone embedded in his eye. The pain is nearly unbearable, and it is permanent. But it is his pain. That shard of bone is his bone. It is a part of him, and it always will be. The bone obstructs his vision now, and he can never extract it. But he can learn to see alongside it, to accept it for what it is. Eventually it will lessen to a dull throb, but it shall never cease. He will always feel it, remember it.
Tears fall from his already moist cheeks. They will be the last tears. He stumbles from the cemetery in a daze, as though walking through the gates is like emerging from the womb: a blind, raw being thrust into a strange new world. Now he stands like a soldier on the front line--faintly trembling, unsure of what lies ahead, but prepared to face it.
The deep complexity of its message is furthered by Olds’ use of metaphor. In describing the unburied corpses strewn about the cemetery, she notes a “hand reaching out / with no sign of peace, wanting to come back.” Through indirect metaphor, she is able to not only bring emotion to the stiffness of a frozen hand, but ponder a greater question—whether the “eternal rest” of death is peace at all. Despite the war, despite “the bread made of glue and sawdust,” and despite “the icy winter and the siege,” those passed still long for life. Human cruelty and the horrors of existence permeate even the sanctity of death. In war, nothing is
All through the times of the intense expectation, overwhelming sadness, and inspiring hope in this novel comes a feeling of relief in knowing that this family will make it through the wearisome times with triumph in their faces. The relationships that the mother shares with her children and parents are what save her from despair and ruin, and these relationships are the key to any and all families emerging from the depths of darkness into the fresh air of hope and happiness.
In Amy Hempels’ Short Story “Going,” our journey with the narrator travels through loss, coping, memory, experience, and the duality of life. Throughout the story is the narrator’s struggle to cope with the passing of his mother, and how he transitions from a mixture of depression, denial, and anger, into a kind of acceptance and revelation. The narrator has lost his mother in a fire three states away, and proceeds on a reckless journey through the desert, when he crashes his car and finds himself hospitalized. Only his thoughts and the occasional nurse to keep him company. The narrator soon gains a level of discovery and realizations that lead to a higher understanding of the duality of life and death, and all of the experiences that come with being alive.
The funeral was supposed to be a family affair. She had not wanted to invite so many people, most of them strangers to her, to be there at the moment she said goodbye. Yet, she was not the only person who had a right to his last moments above the earth, it seemed. Everyone, from the family who knew nothing of the anguish he had suffered in his last years, to the colleagues who saw him every day but hadn’t actually seen him, to the long-lost friends and passing acquaintances who were surprised to find that he was married, let alone dead, wanted to have a last chance to gaze upon him in his open coffin and say goodbye.
The presence of death in the novel looms over the characters, making each of them reflect on the
...pproaching footsteps of him? The novel revolves around the premise of Death's contemplation of the worth of humanity and his inability to reconcile the remarkable cruelty and compassion humans are simultaneously capable of. This fact, this paradoxical, beautiful scenario, follows him always.
“I still recall… going into the large, darkened parlor to see my brother and finding the casket, mirrors and pictures all draped in white, and my father seated by his side, pale and immovable. As he took no notice of me, after standing a long while, I climbed upon his knee, when he mechanically put his arm about me and with my head resting against his beating heart we both sat in silence, he thinking of the wreck of all his hopes in the loss of a dear son, and I wondered what could be said or done to fill the void in his breast. At length, he heaved a deep sign and said: “Oh, my daughter, I wish you were a
Through an intimate maternal bond, Michaels mother experiences the consequences of Michaels decisions, weakening her to a debilitating state of grief. “Once he belonged to me”; “He was ours,” the repetition of these inclusive statements indicates her fulfilment from protecting her son and inability to find value in life without him. Through the cyclical narrative structure, it is evident that the loss and grief felt by the mother is continual and indeterminable. Dawson reveals death can bring out weakness and anger in self and with others. The use of words with negative connotations towards the end of the story, “Lonely,” “cold,” “dead,” enforce the mother’s grief and regressing nature. Thus, people who find contentment through others, cannot find fulfilment without the presence of that individual.
Everyone at some time in their lives must come to the realization that they or others around them will not live forever. After they come to that moment of realization, they will either accept death when it comes and live life to the fullest or deny and live a more sheltered life. James Dickey shows this moment of realization in his poem “The Hospital Window” where a son who has just finished his terminally ill father starts to realize the frail thing called life is compared the great aspect of enjoying life. Dickey’s purpose for this poem is to the reader to realize that life is a feeble thing and one needs to have that revelation for one to truly be able to cherish life and others around oneself. Through Dickey’s use of similes, metaphors, and imagery he is able to fully convey his purpose for this poem and allow for his readers to have a new view of life from the hospital window.
...ome the dream of attainment slowly became a nightmare. His house has been abandoned, it is empty and dark, the entryway or doors are locked. The sign of age, rust comes off in his hands. His body is cold, and he has deteriorated physically & emotionally. He is weathered just like his house and life. He is damaged poor, homeless, and the abandoned one.
When Death stops for the speaker, he reins a horse-drawn carriage as they ride to her grave. This carriage symbolizes a hearse of which carries her coffin to her grave a day or two after her death. As they ride, they pass, “the School… / the Fields of Gazing Grain— / [and] the Setting Sun—” (lines 9-12). These three symbolize the speakers life, from childhood in the playgrounds, to labor in the fields, and finally to the setting sun of her life. When the speaker and Death arrive at the house, it is night.
Throughout his villanelle, “Saturday at the Border,” Hayden Carruth continuously mentions the “death-knell” (Carruth 3) to reveal his aged narrator’s anticipation of his upcoming death. The poem written in conversation with Carruth’s villanelle, “Monday at the River,” assures the narrator that despite his age, he still possesses the expertise to write a well structured poem. Additionally, the poem offers Carruth’s narrator a different attitude with which to approach his writing, as well as his death, to alleviate his feelings of distress and encourage him to write with confidence.
Even from the first paragraph, Hurst's use of vocabulary evokes an emotional response to the story line. His word choice as the narrator describes his surrounding and hints to a fatal event that awaits the reader's attention. Hurst uses words and phrases such as “dead autumn,” “rotting brown magnolia,” “graveyard flowers.” The last sentence, “...speaking softly the names of our dead” adds one final melancholy statement (91). The imagery throughout the paragraph helps to imagine an eerie swamp land surrounded by death and depressing memories. This melancholy setting foresha...
...ttachment or emotion. Again, Heaney repeats the use of a discourse marker, to highlight how vividly he remembers the terrible time “Next morning, I went up into the room”. In contrast to the rest of the poem, Heaney finally writes more personally, beginning with the personal pronoun “I”. He describes his memory with an atmosphere that is soft and peaceful “Snowdrops and Candles soothed the bedside” as opposed to the harsh and angry adjectives previously used such as “stanched” and “crying”. With this, Heaney is becoming more and more intimate with his time alone with his brother’s body, and can finally get peace of mind about the death, but still finding the inevitable sadness one feels with the loss of a loved one “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, indirectly telling the reader how young his brother was, and describing that how unfortunate the death was.
Death is a reality that can be interpreted in many ways. Some people fear the possibility of no longer living and others welcome the opportunity for a new life in the afterlife. Many poets have been inspired by death, be it by the approaching death of loved ones or a battle for immortality. Just as each poet is inspired differently, each poem casts a different hue of light on the topic of death giving readers a unique way to look at death.