The central point of this poem is the author's radical
            reassessment of death given his belief that when we die we actually rejoin nature, which
            is an incredibly powerful force of regeneration and life in the universe. Thus, the
            speaker says, he deliberately eschews the forms of mourning that humans adopt because
            they fail to recognise the way that life metamorphosises and continues rather than
            ceases to be.
In the final stanza, which is the section of
            the poem that you are asking about, the dead girl that the poem's title refers to is
            said to join life in her death, becoming reunited with the "long friends" who have
            passed away before her and the "grains beyond age," which is a symbol of the sands of
            time and seeds, and finally the "dark veins of her mother," which refers to the earth
            and the way that the veins of the earth are its rivers. What is interesting is that
            nature itself is depicted as "unmourning" in the form of the river Thames, even though
            the girl is called "London's daughter." This is because, given the view of death and
            nature, the Thames is regarded as the river of regeneration, and is teeming with life as
            the cells of "London's daughter" form a part once again of the city. There is a pleasing
            symmetry in the way that rivers, journeying from their source, then flow into the sea,
            all being part of the same matter, just as humans, when they die, become part of the
            bigger life of nature and the universe, as it is all part of the same thing as
            well.
The final line of the poem cements the main argument
            of the speaker. Whilst individual life forms can die, we rejoin nature, which is a
            scientific force that is built to endlessly regenerate. Because of this, our first death
            will be our last, because when we rejoin nature, we can no longer "die" in the way that
            humans can.
No comments:
Post a Comment