What’s it like to be dead—and then not? These three couplets comprise Pulter’s answer in a single sentence and form her shortest complete poem. The poem seems at first to be about night, a figure elsewhere associated not just with darkness but terror (see Aurora [1]3); but the poem’s focus here becomes the contrast between our experience of the grave and the experience of the end of time in the anticipated resurrection of souls. The latter will—in one fell swoop just like this verse—swap sin, darkness, death, and night for righteousness, glory, life, and light. The perhaps deliberately simplistic similes in the first couplet thus open up and out to encompass, in only four more lines, the poet’s largest and most longed-for vision of a world beyond this one.
Curations offer an array of verbal and visual materials that invite contemplation of different ways in which a particular poem might be contextualized. Sources, analogues, and glimpses into earlier or subsequent cultural phenomena all might play into possible readings of a given poem. Don't show again