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Kenneth Fearing's Poem Dirge Meaning

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The poem “Dirge” by Kenneth Fearing is an ode to a man who lives and dies unfulfilled by his choices and the boring routine of life. The man seemingly argues that his demise is unfair because he did what society expected of him. He worked as an “executive type” (5), played the stock market, and gambled at the “track at Bowie” often (4). Even after continually losing, he still “wore one grey, tweed suit” and “drank one straight scotch” daily (19-20). These images build a picture of this man. But the man, a businessman, represents an entire class of lonely, hopeless middle and upper class working people who were destroyed when the material life they led went away. While the poem was written in the midst of the Great Depression, its message …show more content…

The use of rhetorical questions like “who the hell ” and “why the hell” show that the executive barely knows the people carrying his deceased body and they barely know him (28-29). The repeated use of the word “hell” suggests that the man’s life was actually hell to live. The “who the hell” attitude of the casket carriers is similar to the attitude the man had about life (27). Perhaps if he were not stuck in his daily routine, he would have people who genuinely cared for him in the end. It is also interesting that people at these places do not remember him. Only the organizations do. This connects to a larger idea that there are no other real people in the poem besides the man. Just large institutions like banks, companies, and symbols of power like Roosevelt or the blank masks of the casket …show more content…

This poem seems like it means more, but it reveals less and less meaning in the man’s life and death. The reader wants his life to have meaning or a lesson, but it does not. The poem does not give us the satisfaction of a conclusion that gives the man’s life real meaning. It just sputters out, and blabs empty words. The poem continually means less the further it goes and after his death. It just becomes emptier and emptier like the man’s life. The reader expects that the ending would have a serious discussion of what the man’s life meant, but there is nothing. Usually, there is some final line in most poems that gives the reader closure and drives us to the ending. Instead, we have words that do not mean anything and get in the way like “pow, awk, and bop” (34-35). “Big dipper” and “summer rain” sound like song lyrics but they are given no meaning or context (34-35). The last line repeats the word “bong” that sounds like a ring of church bells to signify his death (36). Even in end, the man gets no name as the bell

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