Death Warmed Over

Mr. Edson Ng has refused my entreaties that he should participate in this online forum, to share with you his further thoughts on the analysis of these poems which he has gone through with you in class already. How cold-hearted and severe the man can be! Instead, he is going to indulge himself with a trip to Borders while I am stuck here, miserable, lonely, a slave to the desk and to Literature.

Benjamin Franklin King

Christina Rossetti

Comment critically on the contemplation of death by Benjamin Franklin King (1857-94) in If I Should Die and Christina Rossetti (1830-94) in When I am Dead, My Dearest, paying close attention to comparing how the persona has been constructed and the impact of this on the messages of the poems.

In the former poem, the titling of the texts identifies it as a kind of threat because the word ‘If‘ clearly indicates that what is being explored is a possibility rather than a certainty. The speaker obviously is not speaking seriously because while he is addressing the rather morbid possibility of his own death, he seems to mock the recipient of the poem with the hyperbolic nature of his predictions of the recipient’s possible response to such an event and threats to rise from the dead. The use of fixed rhythm and rhyme here lends a lighthearted tone to the poem, complemented by the use of run-on-lines quicken the pace of some of the lines, rendering it like to a witty repartee or rebuke of someone whom the speaker is familiar with, and the effect is congruent with the almost jokey idea of  him returning from the dead at the mention of the ten-dollar debt. In contrast, Rossetti’s poem is much more serious and the punctuation forces the reader to pause at the end of almost every line and sometimes, in between, resulting in a slower pace to accompany the more serious ideas of how the speaker instructs the recipient what to do or not do when she is dead in the first stanza, and what she will be insensible to once she is dead in the second stanza. The rhyme scheme of When I am Dead, My Dearest creates a delayed, almost languid tone because of the multiple pauses which occur before the rhyme pattern is completed. This lends a kind of distance to the voice being used by the speaker, despite the reference to the recipient as ‘my dearest’, which implies a closer, more intimate relationship. Instead, the languid, distant tone supports the instructions being given, that the speaker wants no showy displays of love with ‘roses’ or a ‘cypress tree’, and that the speaker seems sincere in the desire to be remembered or forgotten only ‘if (the recipient) wilt’. This may, at first seem somewhat cold in the light of the unfulfilled expectation of possessiveness or the expression of a command to be remembered, but when the poem is taken as a whole, it is instead calm and pragmatic in its expectations since the facts are that once she is dead (which is itself a fact, as given by the use of the word ‘when’ in the title and the initial line of the poem), she will lose the ability to sense and experience any kind of life or movement. Whereas, the use of the repeated line to envelop the rhyming couplet in If I Should Die draws attention to the excessive grief that the speaker anticipates to create a contrast between the dramatic physicality of the mourning (‘weeping and heartsick’, ‘clasping my bier’) to the triviality of the ‘then dollars that I owe’, giving rise to the attainment of a very humorous effect through the presentation of the recipient as being possibly ridiculous in behaviour in such a circumstance. The speaker then is like a director of a play, indicating who plays what part and how, removing the autonomy of the recipient. Hence both poems, though they bear a certain similarity to each other in terms of how they both adhere to the use of strict structural form and both express directions or commands to their respective recipients, the tones and effects of the poems are quite distinct experiences for the readers who either become objects of obvious satire or else are extolled to not cling to grief.

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