After Someone’s Death (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Tomas Tranströmer
- First Published: 1966
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Suffering, Pain, Death or dying, Scandinavia or Scandinavians, Life, philosophy of, Life and death, Samurai
The Poem
“After Someone’s Death” is a poem of three stanzas of four lines each. As in many of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems, this one begins with the appearance of a story, but by the end, the series of disconnected images do not seem to add up to a coherent narrative. It is the speaker’s visual (rather than organic) ordering of things that holds the poem’s various images together. The title suggests the discontinuity between life and death; it is the time after someone’s death that the poem considers. The speaker is not identified as the one who specifically...
[The entire page is 1521 words long]
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