Madison Thomer
Dr. Mohr
Engl 386 M/W 2pm
9 November 2011
Thanatos
When students alike tend to think of poetry, they tend to think about it in stereotypical thought lines. Poets are dark and depressed, they write about death. In many cases this is true, but perhaps because death is a major theme in life, and something poets recognize that they cannot escape from. The death pull is as constant as is the struggle to survive. Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson are two such poets who have chose death as their muse for several pieces. I have chosen two poems by each poet that represent death in a new or altered light, from Frost, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”, and “Out, out—˝. From Dickinson I have chosen, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” and “Because I Could not Stop for Death”. These poems work to show the reader death, but each in different views as well as working to reveal a new message from the previous. “Out, out—” works at showing the disengagement viewers of death experience. The poem turns objective in the last eight line which helps the reader to see neither they nor the narrator can see something as individual and internal as death shown through the sudden callous narration in lines 32-34, “Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it./No more to build on there. And they, since they/ Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Contrasting this, the preceding twenty-six lines are alive with vivid figurative language, especially in regards to the buzz saw. The poem opens with personification, “The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard”, and later in line 15, “At the word, the saw,/As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,/Leaped out of the boys hand…” The title of this poem also promotes a story. It comes from a line by Shakespeare, his play Macbeth. A play where a young boy is also killed for the work of an older man, further conveys the