The “Afterlife”…a very curious subject that we as humans want to know about, we never want to experience it but we wonder what it would be like. Me as an individual, I am fascinated by the endless amount of ways life could be after death, if there even is life after death. Maybe one day you have the gloomy ,and desirable curiosity questions floating in your head like, “do they miss me, or have they moved on already?” In “Is my Team Plowing”, by A.E. Housman, the emotional speaker discusses how life goes on after death. The speaker, who is thought to be the friend of a dead man, is guilty for moving on in life and having relations with his deceased friend’s wife, so he is having a moment of guilt in his head or else that’s how I interpreted it.
First we will start off with a brief background of the author. Alfred Edward Housman (A.E Housman) was born on March 26, 1859 near Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. At the age of twelve Housman had lost his mom to cancer, which caused his dad to become an alcoholic. When it seemed that Housman had nothing to live for he earned himself a scholarship to St. John’s College, in Oxford where he studied Latin and Greek. Housman was a homosexual and fell in love with a student who also attended St. John’s College, Moses Jackson. This individual seemed to have a major impact on his life, especially academically, considering he failed all of his final exams. He only published two volumes of poetry; A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922). Housman had a great life filled with many poetic movies and inspiration lectures on poetry, passing away on April 30, 1936.
The poem summary is a conversation between a young man and his dead friend. The dead man asks his friend a series of different q...
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...tand the theme that life goes on. He also displays examples of irony and imagery, but still manages to keep the reader wondering what was really going on. Was the poem a description of the conversation between a deceased man and his friend whom was still alive, or was it the guilty conscious mind of the friend still alive?
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“The Dead Swagman” written by Nancy Cato. She was an Australian writer who published multiple historical novels. She was born in 1977 and died in 2000. This poem is the story of a lonely swagman who died, was half cremated by a bush fire and is now merged with the nature and is given new life.
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The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2013. 1471 - 1534 -.
as told from the point of view of a friend serving as pall bearer. The poem
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Death is a reality that can be interpreted in many ways. Some people fear the possibility of no longer living and others welcome the opportunity for a new life in the afterlife. Many poets have been inspired by death, be it by the approaching death of loved ones or a battle for immortality. Just as each poet is inspired differently, each poem casts a different hue of light on the topic of death giving readers a unique way to look at death.
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The third stanza uses hyperboles to describe the depths of love between the two people and the line “He was my North, my South, my East and West” leads the reader to believe that the person who died set a course and now the speaker does not know what direction to take. The deceased was the speaker’s whole world. The disappointment the speaker is experiencing is conveyed when he says, “I thought that love would last fo...