* I have chosen to look at the theme of death in the literature.
* Thesis (in progress, not sure how to say what I really mean) : Death has often been seen as an end, a horrible thing to be avoided. However, These authors challenge these notions by making death beautiful or transformative. Even taking it as far as to link people as a universal bond that holds us all together. We are all human, we are all born, and we will all die.
*Thesis 2 : Death is a universal eventuality, rather than fearing it and avoiding it one should see it as a beautiful part of life. It is a conclusion, not an ending. Nothing ever truly ends, things are simply transformed into something new.
* Some of the literary devices used are Amplification, Analogy, Connotation, and Euphemism.
* Authors and Ideas I feel that I can use to talk about 1) The sorrow of loss 2) The bargaining when faced with the inevitability of loss, the beauty of death, the inavoidability of death (acceptance), and the morbid yet trasformative power of death.
John Keats (403-407, 410-415)
Ode to a nightingale (411)
“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, As though of hemlock I had drunk, or
emptied some dull opiate to the drains”- I think he is talking about suicide in the face of a broken heart.
Ghalib (587-601)
He bargains and accepts that death will come.
Ghalib bargains with “I agree that staying forever isn’t good – but stay with us for a few more days. “ (597). What he fails to realize (or maybe he does and just will not say), is that no amount of time ever be enough when you know the end is coming. He takes some minor comfort in the fact that his family will meet him again one day on Doomsday. However he says that “How great- that doom will have its day on one more day.” (597). I interpret this as him saying that the end of his days is when his happiness is gone from this world. And thus knowing that his wife and the only child he ever really knew would be gone, so would his happiness, and so would his life even if he survived to an old age. He concludes his poem with “It’s my destiny to continue to wish for death for a few more days. “ (598). With his life now empty and void of the lives he held so dear, he felt that there was nothing more to live for, knowing that death was not going to wait a few more days for anyone but him.
Emily Dickinson (480-490)
Seemingly obsessed/ interested with the complexity and beauty of death.
In poem 449 One person died for beauty while the other died for truth. Yet they are both “Brethren”. No matter the reason for their end, all are equal in death. And we are also not alone even in death. “We talked between the Rooms – Until the Moss had reached our lips – and covered up – our names -“ (485)
Her writing themes seems to correspond with Edgar Allan Poe a bit. I also find it refreshing for a woman poet to not shy away from the morbid for something more “ladylike”.
Charles Baudelaire (466-480)
Baudelaire found ideas in common with author Edgar Allan Poe (like Dickinson), “… Who shared his dedication to beauty, his fascination with death, and his found ideas in common with author Edgar Allan Poe, “… who shared his dedication to beauty, his fascination with death, and his passion for perfectly crafted writing.” (466). In Baudelaire’s poem
A Carcass,
he fully encompasses the passions he finds in common with Poe.
He makes death seem noble and appreciated in his wonderful way of colorfully
and morbidly depicting things that would be a true horror to behold.
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