With Memorial Day, there is the danger that we will romanticize the deaths of the fallen rather than face up to the full tragedy. This tension can be seen in a number of World War I poems, some of which romanticize the fallen while others dwell on the absurdity of their deaths.
Tag Archives: death and dying
Memorial Day: Anthem for Doomed Youth
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "For the Fallen", "I Have a Rendezvous with Death", "Soldier", Alan Seeger, Laurence Binyon, Memorial Day, Rupert Brooke, war, Wilfred Owen, World War I | Comments closed
The Fires and the Black River of Loss
We recently held a memorial service for my dear friend and colleague Kate Chandler. I read from some of Kate’s eloquent nature writings and concluded with a Mary Oliver poem.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "In Blackwater Woods", Kate Chandler, Mary Oliver | Comments closed
A Dear Friend Is Made One with Nature
My dear, dear friend Kate Chandler died yesterday. I am turning to Percy Shelley’s, a poem she loved, as I mourn her.
Lit As a Framework for Exploring Death
Paul Kalinithi turned to existential writers as he attempted to understand the fact that he was dying. He arrived at a more spiritual understanding than he anticipated.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Baron Brook Fulke Greville, Krapp's Last Tape, Paul Kalinithi, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Waiting for Godot, Waste Land | Comments closed
Poe: Trapped in the Prison of the Self
Two Chinese students have brought home to me, from their collectivist perspective, how Edgar Allan Poe went against the grain of American individualism. He exposed its dark side, even as Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman were unabashedly celebrated it.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allan Poe, Fall of the House of Usher, marcissism, Masque of the Red Death, Sigmund Freud, uncanny | Comments closed
Death Seems Comely at the Fall of the Leaf
The lure of many autumn poems lies in how they focus on a vanishing beauty. Dante Gabriel Rossetti finds death to be “a comely thing/In Autumn at the fall of the leaf.”
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Autumn Song", Autumn, Dante Gabriel Rossett, Seasons | Comments closed
Emily Dickinson & Going to Heaven
In “Going to Heaven,” Emily Dickinson grapples with the idea of heaven but, in her skepticism, concludes that too much focus on the afterlife will draw her attention away from “curious earth.”
Reconnecting with My Dead Son
Thursday I had a shock of recognition while teaching Stephen King’s IT in my American Fantasy class yesterday. The approach to life that saves the day for the protagonist is the approach that got my eldest son killed 16 years ago. Yet I don’t think King is wrong. In fact, I was comforted once I saw the […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "We Are Seven", Bicycling, Intimations of Immortality, It, Stephen King, Tintern Abbey, William Wordsworth | Comments closed
Poems To Mourn a Russian History Prof
When a Russian history professor died at our college, his colleagues turned to poetry as they wrestled with his premature death. Ovid, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, and Walt Whitman provided powerful words.
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Song of Myself", Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Metamorphoses, Ovid, Walt Whitman | Comments closed
