Essay Questions

How is hell described in the poem "As the Dead Prey Upon Us’’?

The poem deals with the idea of the dead coming back to haunt those who are still alive through different means. At one point, the narrator has a conversation with a young dead man who is inside his house. When the young man is asked about the nature of Hell, he claims that everyone in Hell is poor and is bored. The idea that Hell is boring and that the people inside Hell are plagued by boredom goes against what is told about Hell in various writings and religious documents. But this image also has another purpose, that of transmitting that for us, the people living in a fast paced world, boredom would be the cruelest punishment we could have inflicted upon us.

Explain the lines "And that the hour of your flight/ will be the hour of your death?’’.

These lines appear at the end of the second part of the poem "Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele’’. Up until then, the narrator talked about the passage of time and how humans chose not to focus on happiness and how they would rather focus on the misery and pain in their lives. The lines from above are almost as a conclusion to the poem until that point and what the narrator wants to transmit is how the soul of a person dies in the moment when someone decides to stop fighting for what they want and when they decide to simply do what other people around them are doing. According to the narrator, this is a grave mistake because it represents the hour in which a person dies and is no longer of any value.

Explain some of the legends surrounding the kingfisher.

In the poem "The Kingfisher’’, the narrator mentions the bird and some of the legends associated with the bird. One of the legends comes from ancient Greek and talks about how a pair of birds made their nest on a raft of bones in the middle of the sea during December. The Gods, seeing the birds, took care that the weather remains favorable until the birds reach the shore. Another Greek legend talks about a goddess named Alcyone who was married with a human. Zeus sunk the ship on which the human was and out of grief, Alcyone threw herself in the sea and died. The gods, seeing the pair, transformed them into birds so they could live together forever. There is also a Christian legend linked with the bird that claims that the kingfisher was the first bird to leave Noah’s ark after the flood.