[Tyr Zalo Hawk]: 712.Essays.Response Papers.A Common Thread

So, there I was, reading two poets and Poe when I found a common thread running through the three. This thread, one of eternal life after death, is one that might not be obvious, but, considering that these three works are the only appendices in such a long book, it makes sense that it’s there. Each author goes about winding this thread differently, but that’s what makes it all so much fun.
Poe, master of horror and suspense (not Steven King, as some would argue) takes the thread and gives it to a painter. The painter, thread in hand, weaves it into a portrait of his wife and manages, in the process, to steal away her life. As the work lives on, the painter’s immortality is found only in the explanatory tale that accompanies the painting, but the painting holds in it – if we’re to believe Poe, his story, and the story within – the soul of the woman painted; “[T]he painter stood entranced before the work… while he yet gazed, he… [cried] with a loud voice ‘This is indeed Life itself!” [Anda] turned suddenly to regard his beloved: - She was dead!” (Poe 321). William Cowper, meanwhile, is focused more on a different path to immortality.
In Cowper’s “The Castaway”, a narrator is given the thread of immortality and puts it to the mass of human experience. Instead of working it into a physical medium, the speaker draws on the empathetic nature of his audience:
“No poet wept him: but the page
Of narrative sincere…
And tears by bards or heroes shed
Alike immortalize the dead (Cowper, pg 323, lines 49-54).
The narrator even explains why his audience will sympathize by using one of the oldest clichés there is “misery still delights to trace / Its ‘semblance in another’s case” (Cowper 59-60) Also, this speaker is, interestingly, the one who insists that he be remembered as well, for in the final lines he says “We perish’d, each alone: / But I beaneath a rougher sea, / And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he” (Cowper 64-66). Such is Cowper’s belief in the human experience that he believes this is sufficient to draw the empathy of his readers, and yet Dylan Thomas believes in even more.
For Thomas’s speaker, the memory is all that can give immortality to the person who has passed. His speaker has the thread, and refuses to do anything with it, insisting that the thread will simply make itself known:
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth (Thomas, pg 321, lines 14-18).
No so coincidentally, this is also the one work of the three in which the thread is the hardest to pick out. Because of what the poem suggests, that poetry should not be a means to immortality, the thread that would help do this is left unwoven, and we are only given subtle hints that it exists at all. In fact, were it not for a second reading and its presence in this set of works, I might not have even noticed. It’s beautiful, really.
Thus woven twice and left to its own devices only once, this thematic thread wraps around the reader’s mind and pulls them in. Separately, they are all beautiful works which any reader with a bit of a vocabulary can pleasantly enjoy, but together they say so much more. Together these works are a testament to the many ways which humans seek to be remembered, and to remember that which is gone. Whether it be through poems, stories, or nothing but the memory, these three authors argue that there is a medium that suits each and every purpose in this matter. I can only hope that some day I can grab that thread and manage, through my own works, to live on forever.

Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Oval Portrait” in Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory by Barry, Peter. 3rd ed. Pages 318-321. Manchester University Press: New York, NY. 2009.

Thomas, Dylan. “Refusal to Mourn” in Beginning Theory by Barry, Peter. 3rd ed. Pages 321-322. Manchester University Press: New York, NY. 2009.

Cowper, William. “The Castaway’ in Beginning Theory by Barry, Peter. 3rd ed. Pages 322-324. Manchester University Press: New York, NY. 2009.