Mortality & Poetry

Both Linda Pastan's (2002) The Last Uncle and Sharon Olds' (2002) The Unswept Room deal with themes of mortality and aging, but in quite distinct ways. Pastan's poems in The Last Uncle deal primarily with loss, death, and the aging process and their impact on the individual. However, as McKee (2002) notes, in his review of the collection, "In these careful, insightful considerations of time and its occasional rough edges, the poet finds much to celebrate" (106). Olds' collection of poems deals as much with family dysfunction and sexuality as they do death and aging. However, Olds' poems are much more caustic, graphic, and self-involved. One critic maintains, of the works collected in The Unswept Room, that Olds "writes poetry of sheer, unreconstructed pathos that is not so much autobiographical as autobiological about herself from the neck down" (Reasons 2003, 76).

Despite the different language and tone of each woman's approach to poetry, both convey a preoccupation with the inevitability of death and the impact of aging on individual experience and perception. This is true both in psychological and biological terms, with respect to their impact on the individual. However, Pastan's poems on mortality and aging belie a greater acceptance and appreciation of their inevitability and the riches they also impart than do Olds' works on similar themes.

The tone of Pastan toward mortality appears to be one of willing acceptance of an ine

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/ I would work only / in black and white" (Pastan 2002). However, we do see some reluctance to embrace the chilling fact that death will remove conscious ability from the speaker. When observing a snow-covered landscape, the speaker thinks "This is the death / of color, Winter / is slamming its door / on the heart" (Pastan 2002). However, despite this cold look at the inevitability of death, the speaker leaves us with some consolation from the beauty of the life experience, even if it is one we must leave, "Soon / nothing will remain / but beauty-- / the austere line / of charcoal moving / across white paper, / of bootprints engraved upon new snow" (Pastan 2002). Such metaphors are considered by the author to bring added meaning to her work. In one interview, asked of her particular strength as a poet, Pastan replied, "What interests me most, and what I hope I'm strongest at, is metaphor that's what starts me on poems and what excited me when I'm reading other poems" (Powell 2003, 1). In The Unswept Room, Sharon Olds also employs metaphor but her poems lack the appreciation of beauty and embracing of aging and mortality evident in Pastan's collection on similar topics. In one poem that expresses the speaker's struggles with

Category: Literature - M