To me, this poem is an absolutely haunting piece about the truly relevant human issues: death after love, isolation from the world, stolen moments of salvation through connection with another, and the return to ultimate despair, to death.
The monosyllabic “Gone” conveys- simply and brilliantly- the finality, abruptness, and cruelly simple matter-of-fact nature of the situation. Her parents are gone, and so is she; her departure from church is her rejection (“refusing”) of conventional appearances of mourning (“stiff processions”) and her voluntary exclusion from the herd of believers who share the potentially consoling values she has abandoned.
Her parents are now merely “The dead”, isolated from the living, another species, “alone”. …show more content…
Naturally, she has no energy whatsoever for playing the stoic game of accepting her parents’ deaths and acting composed. In my opinion, this eloquent juxtaposition of fact and feeling reflect an elegantly minimalist …show more content…
Another pronoun shift, “We” becomes” the dead”. Having reached its climax-- the ephemeral moment of blissful escape-- the poem, the speaker, Anne Sexton, and perhaps the reader as well, descend to the abyss where it all started, facing the inescapable truth: death. What of the dead? Have we forgotten them? Do they enter touch as well? Can they too have that flickering moment? We already know the answer.
The stones that descended in the wind from the sea on the lovers in the preceding stanza form the boats that take away the dead. The dead are carried away by the unsympathetic nature of our universe, that which torments us while living and eventually causes our lives to stop. The dead become the matter of that same universe, lacking consciousness, unsympathetic to what they once were: us. They become colder than cruel nature, colder than existence itself.
The dead, like death itself, are the very definition of isolation. The poem begins and concludes in rejection and isolation. Colder than unconscious stone, the dead reject the true and only blessing to the living, the only real source of bliss: connection. That is, perhaps, the truth the dead
The monosyllabic “Gone” conveys- simply and brilliantly- the finality, abruptness, and cruelly simple matter-of-fact nature of the situation. Her parents are gone, and so is she; her departure from church is her rejection (“refusing”) of conventional appearances of mourning (“stiff processions”) and her voluntary exclusion from the herd of believers who share the potentially consoling values she has abandoned.
Her parents are now merely “The dead”, isolated from the living, another species, “alone”. …show more content…
Naturally, she has no energy whatsoever for playing the stoic game of accepting her parents’ deaths and acting composed. In my opinion, this eloquent juxtaposition of fact and feeling reflect an elegantly minimalist …show more content…
Another pronoun shift, “We” becomes” the dead”. Having reached its climax-- the ephemeral moment of blissful escape-- the poem, the speaker, Anne Sexton, and perhaps the reader as well, descend to the abyss where it all started, facing the inescapable truth: death. What of the dead? Have we forgotten them? Do they enter touch as well? Can they too have that flickering moment? We already know the answer.
The stones that descended in the wind from the sea on the lovers in the preceding stanza form the boats that take away the dead. The dead are carried away by the unsympathetic nature of our universe, that which torments us while living and eventually causes our lives to stop. The dead become the matter of that same universe, lacking consciousness, unsympathetic to what they once were: us. They become colder than cruel nature, colder than existence itself.
The dead, like death itself, are the very definition of isolation. The poem begins and concludes in rejection and isolation. Colder than unconscious stone, the dead reject the true and only blessing to the living, the only real source of bliss: connection. That is, perhaps, the truth the dead