Loss of A Loved One
Poetry is literary
work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and
ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm. Poetry is similar to songs in that the poet or lyricist
conveys attitude, feeling and opinion through spoken words. Poems and lyrics
are written but only to retain its words, it differs from prose in that it
involves all the senses. The theme, tragic loss of a loved one, is exemplified
and communicated by the poets in the poems, Stop
All the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone by W.H Auden and One Art by Elizabeth Bishop as
well as in the song “Just A Dream” performed by Carrie Underwood. Both poems
and the song have an intended effect on the reader/listener by portraying a melancholy
and woeful tone, as well as sentiment that allows the reader/listener to
connect and respond on a human emotional level.
W. H. Auden's
poem, Stop All the Clocks, Cut off the
Telephone conveys the meaning of overwhelming grief, despair, tragic loss,
and an unrelenting pessimism. The tone of the poem portrayed to the reader is a
melancholy that gradually becomes more evident throughout the poem. The first
stanza in the poem describes the poet’s inconsolable grief by asking the
audience to do something that is impossible, “Stop All the Clocks” (W.H.
Auden). The author wants everyone to mourn the deceased with him by eliminating
all distractions of the world such as the “clocks ticking, telephones ringing,
dogs barking, and the piano’s playing” (W.H. Auden). The first three lines of
the poem are asking the audience to cease certain actions, but it is not until
the last line of the first stanza that the poet allows an action, “Bring out
the coffin, let the mourners come.”
The second stanza elaborates how the
poet has become deeply touched by the loss of his loved one and wants others to
share in his grief. Lines 5 and 6 show
the poignancy of the death to the poet; he wants to inform the rest of the
world of the tragic news by “Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead”
(W.H. Auden). It is not until the third stanza, line 9, that we understand the
intimate relationship of the poet with the deceased when he says, “He was my
North, my South, my East and West.” This line conveys the image that the
deceased man meant the world to the poet as he compares his love for him to
compass directions. Alongside with line 9, line 10 thoroughly conveys this
relationship to be one of a very intimate nature, “My working week and my
Sunday rest”. When the poet says, “I thought that love would last forever: I
was wrong” the reader is able to comprehend the strong love between the poet
and the deceased. On one level it is evident that the poet’s ignorance toward
an inevitable death is what makes him sorrowful. It is not until the death of his
lover that he realizes that the physical aspect of love, like anything else,
will come to an end. The last stanza amplifies the tone of hopelessness of the
poem. Lines 13-15 again ask the audience to perform extraordinary tasks such as
to “pack up the moon, dismantle the sun, pour away the ocean and sweep up the
wood.” The poet wants everyone to share in his grief; these precisely picked
words also allow us to fathom that life no longer has a purpose when the ones
you love are dead, “For nothing now can ever come to any good.” The irony of
the last stanza is that although the physical love is gone, the emotional love
endures otherwise the poet would not have written of the tragic event.
In
correlation to W.H Auden’s poem, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art approaches loss in a rather different manner; it does not
dive straight into the loss of a loved one, but instead it begins with the
little losses we often experience here and there. The first stanza of the poem
begins with the statement that it is fairly easy to lose something, whether it
is a tangible object or an intangible feeling, “The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem
filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster” (Bishop). The
poet begins the poem with the loss of material objects such as a key and the
precious concept of losing time, an event she encounters which potentially does
not mean as much as losing a loved one, “Lose something everyday. Accept the
fluster of lost keys, the hour badly spent” (Bishop). She gradually names
things in her life that she’s lost and claims that experience of lost can yield
to mastery, “The practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and
where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster”. The
fourth and fifth stanzas reference the loss of a watch belonging to the poet’s
mother, as well as losing three houses she loved, “I lost my mother’s watch.
And look! My last… of three loved houses went”. It is evident that the
significance and value of the tangible objects are beginning to increase as she
continues on by saying she “lost two cities, two rivers and a continent”. The
juxtaposition of the loss of rivers and a continent allows the reader to grasp
the idea of losing one’s whole world. “The art of loosing isn’t hard to master”
is used as the refrain, which has dual purposes. It simultaneously allows the
reader and narrator to feel as though the loss is controlled while also
intensifying the pain. Although the poet does not explicitly say it, the
reader suspects there’s a loss of a person, a loss so deep that the speaker
can’t talk about it. She says, “(Write it!)”
instead in order to command herself to confront the reality of the “disaster” (Bishop).
In terms of content, it’s casual tone and graceful flow is the poet’s attempt
to avoid feeling anything over the loss of the material objects or the loss of
her loved one.
Comparatively,
Carrie Underwood’s song “Just A Dream” conveys a heavy-hearted tone and a
feeling of miserable dejection through the theme, the tragic loss of a loved
one. The lyricist describes the situation of a wife; fiancé or significant
other receiving news that their loved one has died in (KIA) combat. The first
stanza in the song descriptively conveys the scene of an expected wedding
between the artist and her loved one, but suddenly the event turns from white
to black as she finds herself walking down the aisle to her fiancé’s coffin, “She
put her veil down, trying to hide the tears. Oh she just couldn't believe
it. She heard the trumpets from the
military band and the flowers fell out of her hand” (Underwood). The chorus:
Baby why'd you leave me. Why'd you
have to go? I was counting on forever, now I'll never know, I can't even
breathe. It's like I'm looking from a distance, standing in the background,
everybody's saying, he's not coming home now. This can't be happening to me.
This is just a dream.
delineates how the death of her fiancé deeply and
traumatically affects her. She denies the fact that her fiancé is dead and
cannot come to terms with reality when she says, “This is just a dream”. When
someone is in deep depression she feels as if she is separated from the rest of
the world as Underwood describes, “It’s like I’m looking from a distance,
standing in the background.” As the song proceeds the artist expounds upon the
disheartening feeling she experiences and uses the simile of a mortal wound to
depict it, “And then the guns rang one last shot and it felt like a bullet in
her heart.” The lyricist illustrates the heart wrenching, uncomfortable feeling
one endures after her loved one dies by using similes to make descriptions more
emphatic or vivid.
Both poems Stop All the Clocks, Cut Off the Telephone
and One Art as well as the song “Just
A Dream” encapsulate the theme of the tragic loss of a loved one. Each has a
tone of sad, inconsolable, devastation along with a gloomy state of mind. Each
poet or lyricist conveys this theme and in turn has an intended effect on the
reader/listener. Through poetry the audience is able to relate with the poet on
a human emotional level either by empathizing or sympathizing. Poetry takes
ideas, emotions and feelings that cannot be expressed any other way and conveys
them with imagery. This imagery can say many different things to many different
people, but once the word has gone out, it will stay with those people like a
seed. Without poetry, many people would be lost trying to understand certain
things about people and about life in general. It is the truest expression of
our deepest emotions, one that mere words alone cannot portray.
Works
Cited
Auden,
W. H. “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.” The Norton Introduction to
Literature Ninth Edition. Eds. Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, and Kelly J. Mays.
New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. 609-610
Bishop,
Elizabeth. "One Art." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2014.
<http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/one-art>.
Underwood,
Carrie. "Just A Dream." Just A Dream Lyrics. N.p., n.d. Web.
01 May 2014.
<http://www.metrolyrics.com/just-a-dream-lyrics-carrie-underwood.html>.
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