Death Be Not Proud

Oh hey, I didn't leave any slightly-related pictures on any of those last four posts. I'll have to remedy that.

Also, the first two lines of this poem were totally stolen from the song "Follow the Reaper" by Children of Bodom. Someone should alert the Plagiarism Police before this John Donne fellow strikes again. If that is his real name.

The rhyme scheme of this poem is ABBAABBACDDCAE. That last line is wrong, just wrong. However, this allows me to discuss the pattern and/or structure of the poem, thus answering question 17. This poem is a sonnet; the 14 line-ness is a bit of a tip-off. And thus, the first eight lines go together, which makes sense, because they all rhyme with each other and make reference to a Swedish pop music group (abba, get it?). These first eight lines address Death, and tell him to hop right off his pedestal. Many people say that Death is frightening or powerful, but the speaker asserts that this is quite untrue. He states that Death lacks the power to ever truly kill anyone, implying that there may just be something beyond it. Furthermore, he declares that Death is in fact a pleasant experience, as rest and sleep are just brief glimpses of Death, and thus Death must be just as relaxing and enjoyable as sleep.

The last six lines, therefore, offer a new idea: the ultimate destruction of Death. The speaker reinforces that Death has no real power by saying that it is subject to the will of fate, chance, kings, and desperate men. He essentially says "Death doesn't kill people, people kill people!" Then he says that we don't even need Death to bring peace. We've got poppy and charms, which I'm about 93% sure is a reference to opium. Nice. And then the speaker closes with the last two lines, stating that after the short sleep, a.k.a. Death, has passed, we are free from Death, able to live eternally, and then Death itself shall be vanquished.

Dang Plagiarism Police...always trying to keep a brother down

Crossing the Bar

This poem, yet another in the long line of poems about dying, evokes a particularly strong tone (Question 8). First, the speaker makes clear his metaphor between crossing a sandbar and dying with the line "may there be no moaning of the bar when I put out to sea." The speaker here is requesting that nobody cry or mourn his passing, thus giving the general impression that the speaker is not upset about his death, but rather views it as a happy occasion, and doesn't want anyone else to mourn his death. This point is reinforced by the line "May there be no sadness of farewell when I embark." However, the poem takes on a deeper tone with the line "When that which drew from out the boundless deep turns again home." The speaker adds a bit of a religious element to his attitued by essentially stating that the afterlife is his true home, and that he is only returning to where he belongs. Yet another line to reinforce this religious attitude is "I hope to see my Pilot face to face when I have crossed the bar." The term "hope" in this line could have a potentially ambiguous meaning, but because of the strongly established tone of religiously-based optimism, the word takes on the very clear meaning of strong desire. The speaker does not just view death in a positive light, but it is his ultimate desire. He wants, above all else, to return home and see God.

I like sailing....

Six - How to Tell a True War Story

In this chapter, O'Brien discusses how to discern the truth from a war story, and provides some truly charming examples from a squad firebombing a Vietnamese glee club to Rat Kiley gradually dismantling a buffalo with his M16. Now, I could talk about what all of these individual stories all mean ad infinitum (look at me using Latin, oh ho), so I'll just zoom in on one little thing he wrote that I found particularly intriguing: "That proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life" (p. 77). I guess the reason why this struck me as so important was because I've seen this theme of death, or near-death, bringing on a new appreciation for life in many other places. The most prominent of which I found a while ago in my recent reading of the novel Shōgun by James Clavell. Anjin-san, the protagonist, suffers a bitter insult, and thus decides to commit suicide, but is stopped by the others present. This near death experience causes Anjin-san to take on a new perspective for life, allowing him to appreciate it more fully. Another example of this concept is the song "Life is Beautiful" by Sixx:A.M. The general premise of the song is that "When you've lost it all, that's when you realize that life is beautiful." I just made a connection between Feudal Japan, Vietnam, and modern rock. There should be a literary term for that.

This is a samurai. He was in Shōgun.