Paschal Lamb Poem Analysis

Robert Hass’s poem “Paschal Lamb” explores the value of sacrifice on an individual scale. The poem examines narratives surrounding the war in Vietnam, most of which center around the speaker’s story about David. Using the Viet Nam War, the metaphor of the sacrificial lamb, and the story of a woman in Greece, Hass looks at how intellect mutes or distances a person from the meaning of sacrifice and how it leads to feelings of power and comfort. Faced with a palpable or immediate sacrifice, in this case life or death or the loss of a job, the individual 's rendered vulnerable and powerless; however, Hass finds that while sacrifice necessarily creates an uncomfortable and unjust power dynamic, knowledge and understanding can prepare an individual to feel merely affronted rather than harmed when called to make a sacrifice, if they are afforded the chance to do so. …show more content…
The speaker of the poem presents this concept abstractly in the second stanza of the poem, using a mini-parable of a woman who lived in Greece: “when she walked on the high road above the sea back to her house from the village in the dark, and the sky seemed immense, the moon terribly bright, she wondered if her life would be a fit gift.” The diction in the paragraph is littered with words that create a sense of removal and abstractedness. The woman is moving along a “high road” in the dark; she is momentarily connected to nothing, underneath an “immense” sky, above the sea, and she can see nothing in the dark, yet remarks about the “terribly bright” moon. In