Requiem

The poem is set against a striking backdrop of an open, star-filled night sky. The “wide and starry sky” (Line 1) symbolizes the poem’s sense of affirmation and its resistance to the sorrow typical of the funeral rites. It is, after all, a night sky, all too appropriate for a burial poem given night with its gothic connotations of creepy dread. Dread is not what the poem is about. Wonder is what the poet affirms.

Nature is big, certainly, but offers within that generous magnitude a compelling sense of humanity’s place within it. Importantly, the poet does not demand the stars form into some hokey constellation. He does not insist on scribbling comforting and entirely artificial images to domesticate the night sky. After all, without the reassuring pictures of swans or bears or soup ladles the night sky would be a terrifying expanse of sheer open, a reminder of how small and vulnerable a person set against the vastness and indifference of the material universe is. Rather than pretend the night sky is like the connect-the-dots page in some kid’s coloring book, the poet here positions his grave beneath the open space of the stars themselves, this night sky gloriously undomesticated, wonderfully what it is, a reminder of the enclosing and enveloping strength of a material world whose vastness cannot, will not bow to humanity’s futile insistence on trying to know it into fact.