Essay about Death in Life and Love in Dorothy Parker's Poetry

Bruce Dawe’s poems “Katrina”,” A Victorian Hangman Tells His Love”, “Homo Suburbiensis “ and “Enter Without So Much As Knocking” depict life and death through the use of similar poetic techniques such as metaphors, imagery, onomatopoeia, tone and similes, although, with different circumstances. The events in these four poems evoke emotions within the reader, the most common being sadness and frustration. These emotions are explored, in all four poems, through the tone of melancholy.

Life. Death. Time. The poem “Life” is about how everyone birthed and lives their lives, and then everyone dies one day no matter what. Times runs out for every person on the Earth. This poem reminds me of when my great-grandmother died. She was in her nineties and my family and I thought that she would live longer than she did. It was very sudden and I was shocked at the funeral. I think it was just time for her to let go. It’s hard losing someone who is close with one. The author’s tone is light- hearted and simple. The mood of the poem can make someone feel more comfortable with the thought of death. This essay will show how the author’s tone and the reader’s mood can affect how the poem, “Life” is read.

In literature, themes shape and characterize an author’s writing making each work unique as different points of view are expressed within a writing’s words and sentences. This is the case, for example, of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” and Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death.” Both poems focus on the same theme of death, but while Poe’s poem reflects that death is an atrocious event because of the suffering and struggle that it provokes, Dickinson’s poem reflects that death is humane and that it should not be feared as it is inevitable. The two poems have both similarities and differences, and the themes and characteristics of each poem can be explained by the author’s influences and lives.

Anne Bradstreet’s and Phillis Wheatley’s poems both share the themes of death and religion, but Bradstreet explores these themes by tying them to nature and her personal struggles with simplicity and a religious lens, while Wheatley incorporates race using a sophisticated, Christianity-saturated perspective often bordering on impersonal.

In the poem “ A Bitterness”, Mary Oliver illustrates a case of crippling melancholy. Oliver depicts the speaker reflecting upon the troubled life and death of someone that they knew. The solemn tone of the speaker is maintained throughout the poem to verify their position on the matter upon which they are reflecting. By using consistent repetition and descriptive comparisons, Oliver conveys the general theme that the bitterness accompanying sadness and sorrow can envelop all aspects of life.

A great poem shocks us into another order of perception. It points beyond language to something still more essential. It ushers us into an experience so moving and true that we feel at ease. In bad or indifferent poetry, words are all there is. Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” is a great poem, not because it is popular or it is classic, but because of its underlining message. “Annabel Lee” is a poem of death, love, and beauty. It captures the narrator’s interpretation of these three ideas through his feelings and thoughts for one woman. The narrator, Edgar Allan Poe, becomes infatuated at a young age with the character in the poem, Annabel Lee. Even after she passes away, his love for her only increases and only becomes

Human-kind has a complicated relationship with death. We intellectually regard it as something inevitable, but that doesn’t stop us from feeling baffled or victimized by it. Wit by Margaret Edson portrays an attempt at understanding this relationship. Its main character, Vivian Bearing, is an accomplished literature professor who is facing the last stage of ovarian cancer. Following Vivian’s last days of life, the work explores mortality by examining one’s personal relationship with death through literature and society’s responsibility toward the dying through characterization.

In her essay “Nine Days of Ruth,” Angela Morales eloquently yet humorously narrates the final nine days of her grandmother’s life. Initially, Morales reminisces about the day her grandmother Ruth passed away projecting a gothic, murky and vacant atmosphere. However, Morales shifts from a leaden tone to a more gratifying voice revealing her grandmother’s life trajectory: betrayal, death, and struggles. The author ends with a eulogy expressing to her grandmother that while other will bury with a different image or perspective in mind, she will bury her as a luminary. Make-believe, fantasy, and imagination play an important role in the essay because it conveys the beauty of death.

Dorothy Livesay’s work expresses her identity as both woman and poet. In integrating female experience into her work, Livesay challenges patriarchal views of “the poet” as an archetype and the connection between male and female and nature and culture. Livesay states “I have always been fascinated by the role of woman as writer” (Livesay 2), in examining Livesay’s poetry from 1926-1944 the role of “woman as writer” speaks on women’s issues through connecting the identity of woman to nature and the patriarchy to culture. Livesay’s work holds radical feminist thought, through examination of her nature imagery and the conflicts presented between nature and culture her poetry can be viewed through a radical feminist lens as “ecofeminism”. Ecofeminism links feminist ideology with ecology and suggests that paternal-capitalistic society has “lead to a harmful split between nature and culture”(Cirksena and Cuklanz 29), linking “the treatment of women to the treatment of the environment.(Cirksena and Cuklanz 30). Although Livesay identifies with nature, she still holds a place in culture as a citizen and a writer and through "identifying herself with both nature and poetry she creates for herself a unique female poetic role: that of mediator between culture and nature" (Relke 219). Livesay challenges the patriarchal views of "the poet", the treatment of women in society and the connection between culture and nature. Taking on the role of "poet mediator" between culture and nature,

period as all they could do was to stay at home. The phrase, 'doll to

Robert Frost is an iconic poet in American literature today, and is seen as one of the most well known, popular, or respected twentieth century American poets. In his lifetime, Frost received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, and the Congressional Gold Medal. However, Robert Frost’s life was not always full of fame and wealth; he had a very difficult life from the very beginning. At age 11, his father died of tuberculosis; fifteen years later, his mother died of cancer. Frost committed his younger sister to a mental hospital, and many years later, committed his own daughter to a mental hospital as well. Both Robert and his wife Elinor suffered from depression throughout their lives, but considering the premature deaths of three of their children and the suicide of another, both maintained sanity very well. (1)

The poem, “Résumé”, is about the inconveniences of suicide, and Dorothy Parker intends to tell that living is bad, but not nearly as bad as all the ways you could commit suicide, indicated by the final line of “might as well live”. The mood established in the poem is pessimistic, indicated by saying “might as well”, which shows unwillingness but acceptance of life, a concept that most anyone

By examining the poetic devices and how Whitman uses them to heighten the sense of death and different facets of grief it becomes obvious that while both poems intimately explore death, grief, and morbidity, When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom'd presents a more generalized, transcendental, mournful representation of grief, the poem Out of the Cradle Endlessly rocking confronts the reader with the stark pain and reality of death

Dorothy Parker 's poem "Resume" manages the topic of suicide. In spite of the fact that it is a fairly succinct poem it talks about a dull thought in an unexpected tone. She makes the different methods for conferring suicide preferably everyday than what the real demonstration would cause along these lines making a modest representation of the truth. This poem considers the unfortunate existence of Dorothy Parker whose three relational unions fizzled and had imprudently endeavored suicide a few times.

Some of the dark negative emotions Sylvia Plath shares in this poem can make anyone have sympathy on her feelings. Especially, when she writes,