Rhetorical Devices In The Poem Dirge

In the poem Dirge, Fearing uses devices such as sarcasm, repetition, and alliteration to make a social commentary on the American Dream. I think the repetition is used as a way to symbolize how every day repeats the same until we retire or die, the so-called never-ending hamster wheel of life. The best example of this is in stanza five: And wow he died as wow he lived,/Going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,/Zowie did he live and zowie did he die. He uses sarcasm to poke fun, in a way, at how obsessed people are with money and material goods. The parts where he says, O executive type, O fellow with a will who won’t take no, and O democratic voter in the second stanza, are

all examples of sarcasm. He makes it sound like these types of people are something special when they aren’t really that special. He uses alliteration to draw attention to the words and bring a certain mood to the text. Examples of this are in stanza four: one straight Scotch, one short step, one long look. They create a short clipped rhythm, which is ironic considering the last line of the stanza: Just one too many, which has the connotation of something being too long.
The commentary that he makes is that certain people, e.g. stockbrokers, businessmen, are all too worried about having the American Dream, i.e. material goods and possessions, and not worried enough about other things. We think that the American Dream is this really good and awesome thing that everyone should have and we can have everything we ever wanted, but in reality the American Dream doesn’t exist. There is only a distorted, sugar-coated idea of what we think it is. We all try and try to be better and succeed and have all these things, but it can all fall apart at a moment’s notice, e.g. the stock market crash of 1929, hence this poem about a stockbroker committing suicide, which happened quite a lot after the stock market’s crash in 1929.
Personally, I think this poem is less of a dirge for this dead man, but more of a dirge for the death of the American Dream. When the stock market crashed, so did everyone’s dreams of being prosperous in America.