A Poem on Death
by Allison McNamara
Death
There’s no use trying to get around it
No bargaining, no lies can outwit it
Everything dies.
Quick and violently
Slow and silently
How? Doesn’t matter to it
Stealer or cheater
Helper or leader
Who? Doesn’t matter to it
Cash in your chips, the game is done
You’ve come out behind like everyone else
Who has tried their hand at this game
It wins again and again
“We’re back to death again” 1
Everything dies.
And then that’s
It.
1. From: Smith, Patricia. “Us, and the World Outside.” Close
to Death. Cambridge: Zoland Books, Inc., 1993. 35-38.
There are many different monsters that are portrayed in literature. Some are physical fantasy monsters, like Dracula, or werewolves. Other monsters are less tangible, such as drug addiction. The poem that I wrote is about the ultimate intangible, yet ever-present monster: death. In the poem, I use sentence structure, alliteration, and other devices to demonstrate the ultimate power of death.
The general idea of the poem itself is to persuade the reader that death is
inevitable. Therefore, I made the assumption before writing the poem that
a lot of people must have a hard time coming to terms with this certainty
that they will eventually die. Of course, it is obvious that we will all die
at some point. If any sane person was asked if they were immortal, the clear
answer is an emphatic no. But as Philippe Aries says “Death has become
unnamable… technically, we admit that we might die; we take out insurance
on our lives to protect our families from poverty. But really, at heart we
feel we are non-mortals” (106). Also, Charles Segal says that to really
understand death, “the first step is to overcome our denial of the world’s
mortality” (100). The first two lines of my poem address this feeling
of immortality, and then shoot it down. The third line sums it up: “Everything
dies” (just to make sure the reader didn’t miss my point). It
is in my opinion that this feeling of immortality is utilized by people as
a shield to block out the overwhelming idea of death. We also try to personify
death, most typically with the image of the grim reaper. This is an attempt
to put death in some sort of terms that we can relate to, and the tangible
physical image of the grim reaper is easier to deal with than the vague idea
of death. Most people fear death because it is so unknown and forbidding.
In the novel In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Dick and Perry are on death row
for brutally killing four members of the Clutter family. While waiting for
death, Dick talks about how he actually favors capital punishment in general:
“I believe in hanging. Just so long as I’m not the one being hanged”
(Capote 336). Dick is obviously afraid of being hanged and dying. But eventually
both Dick and Perry end up taking “that ride on the Big Swing”
(Capote 335).
Death came to these two murders just as it did to the Clutters.
This is shown in my poem with lines 4-9. Who dies and how they die doesn’t
matter to death. I used alliteration in line 5, “slow and silently”.
The alliteration is fitting in this way, because I wanted the form of the
line to match the meaning, and the “s”s slow the line down and
catch the reader’s attention. This slowing down of the line matches
the actual words in the line. Also, the end rhymes in lines 4 and 5 (“violently”
and “silently”) and in lines 7 and 8 (“cheater” and
“leader”) draw attention to the contrast of the lines. It doesn’t
matter whether you die in less than a second from a point blank bullet in
the head like the Clutter’s died, or die from a cancer that slowly eats
away at your mind for years before you pass away. And more pertinent to the
book In Cold Blood; it doesn’t matter whether you’re good or evil.
Mr. Clutter was “the community’s most widely known citizen”
(Capote 6), and his daughter, Nancy Clutter, was “a straight-A student”
(18). Their well-to-do style of living, however, could not keep them from
death. Dick and Perry, on the other hand, led quite different lives. They
committed many crimes, including murder, and ran from the law in a stolen
car. And in the end, they died as well. No matter who you are what you do,
death is inevitable.
This certainty of death is also shown in my poem in lines 13
and 14. The repetition of “again” shows that death won’t
stop for anything, that it will keep coming and coming. The quote in line
14, “We’re back to death again” is taken from a poem called
“Us, and the World Outside” by Patricia Smith taken from her collection
of poems called Close to Death. Smith writes about African American males
living in violent environments in New York City. This particular poem that
the quote was taken from has to do partly with alcoholism, which is a monster
in and of itself that can bring on death, as it did to the one man who got
taken away in an ambulance in this poem. I decided to take this particular
line from the poem because it portrays how death repeatedly comes and cannot
be stopped.
Lines 10 – 13 show the comparison between life and death.
“Cash in your chips” brings to mind an image of life, more specifically,
night life in Las Vegas, where people are having fun and living life to the
fullest. This image of happiness, laughter and togetherness is quickly squashed
by the next line, “You’ve come out behind like everyone else”
which shows that things aren’t quite as happy as the first seemed. Eventually
the poem comes to the line “We’re back to death again” which
shows that death always conquers over life. Although it may seem as though
you are having an amazing time and an amazing life that could go on forever,
that’s not what’s going to happen, because “Everything dies.”
The final touch on the poem is the last line, which is a single word, “It.”
The word “it” obviously refers to death, and because death is
final and ends everyone’s lives, it was fitting to end the poem with
it.
Death has always been elusive in a certain sense because it
is so unfamiliar and final. Death will always be present, and although many
people put themselves into denial to make themselves more comfortable, the
fact of the matter is that we will all die someday, which is shown in my poem,
“Death”.
Aries, Philippe. Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the
Present.
Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. New York: Random, 1965.
Segal, Charles. Lucretius on Death and Anxiety. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990.
Smith, Patricia. “Us, and the World Outside.” Close to Death.
Cambridge: Zoland Books,
Inc., 1993. 35-38.
