Analysis of Death, or something like it
DEATH, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
I left the light on in the kitchen
while I dozed in my chair….
Now that power is gone, wasted,
uncorrectable error.
A hummingbird’s trapped in my garage,
though I’ve lifted the door….
Frantic, it knows no way but upward,
while escape lies below.
The molting cardinal, head blackened,
comes seeking birdseed here….
Does he see himself in my window
and know what we call fear?
Some people fear the light burning out,
batteries too soon drained ….
With ointments and salves, they carry on,
complaining of the pain.
A psychoanalyst* calls dying
life’s “loneliest event”….
And in his book, he calls fear of death
“mother of all religion.”
What I fear is not death or dying,
but living out my death,**
walled off from mothers, fathers, children,
marking time to the end.
*Yalom, Irvin D. (2010). Staring at the Sun. John Wiley & Sons.
**A phrase borrowed from Dunne, John Gregory (2005). True Confessions. Da Capo Press, Reprint edition.
Scheme | X AXXX XXXB XXBX XXXX CXDA CDAX XA |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 111011 110110010 111011 11101110 110 01010101 111001 101111110 101101 010100110 110101 111010110 011111 110101101 100111 11011101 010101 00100110 1101 001111111 1011010 111111110 110111 111101010 101101 1101101011101 0111111001010110101010 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 994 |
Words | 194 |
Sentences | 19 |
Stanzas | 8 |
Stanza Lengths | 1, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 2 |
Lines Amount | 27 |
Letters per line (avg) | 27 |
Words per line (avg) | 6 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 92 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 21 |
About this poem
When you live alone, small things take on outsized meaning.
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"Death, or something like it" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 13 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/184917/death%2C-or-something-like-it>.
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