Readings for June 8

“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin

This is a story about tension: constant interplay with competing existences, based mostly on life versus death. Mrs. Mallard takes in the death of her husband and sees life in it; when she sees that he is alive, she is killed by the shock. Mrs Mallard confines herself in a room to fully understand what liberation means. The passive narrator takes the reader through the stifled liberation of Mr. Mallard to show that life and death are more than just states; they become symbolic of a larger choice to liberate oneself in life or imprison oneself in death. Or, maybe I have it backwards: perhaps Mrs. Mallard’s death was a liberation as her life represented a sort of imprisonment under Mr. Mallard. Overall, what does life and death mean in this story?

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

If you are searching for concrete meaning in this poem, it ain’t gonna happen. This poem is typical of modern stream of consciousness writing where authors write in pit of despair, wallowing and wallowing and weaving verse to talk about their wallowing. I don’t mean to say that Prufrock (the speaker in the poem) is a whiner; he is actually, in my estimation, a very honest individual. He wanders through the numb cityscapes, hoping that “indeed there will be time” (line 37) but closing has come nearer than expected as the author bellows in frustration, “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” (line 104). The frustrations, the laments, are a catharsis of some sort for Prufrock. He is unsatisfied, but he does have the forum of this poem. Should he have embraced this forum?

“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden

You just as well could titled this poem, “go about your business.” For the overwhelming idea of humanity is lost in simple living, and the painting that Auden is inspired by demonstrates this: the remarkable fall of Icarus and how the world around him ignored such a tragedy like someone walking past a man dying on the street corner. Does this poem note that life and death are just simple truths in life, or does it reveal that people choose to not look at life and death?

“Traveling through the Dark” by William Stafford

In contrast to Auden’s poem, the narrator of this poem wrestles with the concepts of life and death. The basic reality is that the person needs to remove the deer from the road to avoid cars from getting in accident, but the narrator cannot help by stare at death and life (a fawn “alive, still, never to be born” line 11). And though the narrator decides to roll the deer into the canyon (the practical decision), the hesitation of the narrator showed an acknowledgement of the gravity of the situation. Death is not mundane; life is not mundane. This may seem like a practical dealing with wildlife, but it is not mundane. Do you have any times in your life when you have had a similar encounter with life and/or death?

“my old man” by Charles Bukowski

Though Bukowski wrote this poem much later in his life (at a time when he might have understood his father a little more as an adult), he chooses to remain in the state of his 16 year old self: young, cocky, ambivalent, and unsure why his father would relate to a story about a man’s tragic death. At least 16 year old Bukowski understood the intimacy that this story created between himself and his father as he close the poem in “as close / as we ever got” (lines 71-72). What does it mean when a son writes a story (that when he “had written it / I had no idea / of what I was / writing about” lines 60-63) and this story touches his somewhat callously depicted father?