A Look into Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead" and Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

Rukeyser's first five stanzas stand on this surface of seeing how people tend to fear and avoid death as a topic. Here, too, the "you" takes the people as a collective body going through the same experience. "The people", the readers, then are introduced to the dark cloud of gloom over death and the vague social taboo that prevents people from openly talking about the problem. Like Whitman, there's the sense of isolation, but the feeling is being sent to the reader as their own (and the narrator) as opposed to Whitman bearing this pain for himself but expressing it as a great grief over a great loss. In that regard, the message comes across, to me, as a reader, as a direct experience, whereas Whitman's poem becomes a personal, engaging encounter with the narration's sharing of his experience (as if I'm listening to a friend speak for himself and feeling what he feels).

On that note, Whitman goes from addressing a fellow mourner (perhaps "the people") of the dead to also directly confronting a metaphorical manifestation of Death. As the narration seeks to overcome grief, Death as a personification becomes a force to interact, encounter, antagonize, accept, and to converse and rejoice with. Something similar is also going on with the star in the night sky and the bird, as the struggle between being trapped by sorrow and praise for Death evolves into a final song -- the latter has won. To me, because Whitman writes of a direct conflict with the dead via these literary devices, somehow his mourning comes alive (ironic as that is), and becomes something that can be shared in an empathetic sort of way. One can feel the inner conflict between denial of the loss or feeling trapped by accepting death as some natural force that reigns our lives (and also as something that serves as a wonderful force, as much as we tend not to see the true face of our "dark mother") and celebrating the passing as freedom of suffering for the departed as also as a striking feature of life. On the other hand, I get the impression that the speaker in Rukeyser's poem also has a less despairing insight on death, but it is different from Whitman's message in that, the future is bright because there's "another day"for us as the living. Death still looms, but we must grow to accept it in the regard that, while we still hold the fate and the past dearly, there still is more to press on forward.