 is similar to the regular beat of a medical device:  transparent tubes, striking/ Their compromise with the body.’ The term ‘striking’ is often used when describing a deal being made – here, the life-support machines are coming to a deal, or a ‘compromise’, with the mother’s body. They will provide oxygen and sustenance, but this will come at a cost. We also use the verb ‘striking’ to describe a clock striking the hour and, as anyone who has been at the bedside of an extremely ill person knows, time feels different in such situations. The sense of anticipation and impending loss is hard to bear, and the speaker conveys both this and the inevitability of death with the word ‘Soon’.


  leave us when we are dying: ‘When you close your eyes,/ I know you are listening/ To a dark chamber// Around a chord of light.’ Numerous interpretations have been made of these sombre and beautiful lines: The poet’s mother may be hearing a beautiful piece of music, or she may be seeing a shaft of light in the darkness (perhaps the ‘light at the end  (Emily Dickinson, Smith’s favourite poet, often pondered this very moment in her poetry.) But the poet feels sure that she somehow knows what her mother is experiencing, as ‘I know you are deciding/ That the body’s a question:’ And so, the body is compared to memory, to appetite, to caution  ‘What do you believe in?’ The use of rhetorical language engages the reader. What did Smith’s mother believe in? Heaven? Reincarnation? And more provocatively, what do we, the readers of this poem, believe in? It is clear that while this elegy is deeply personal to Smith and her sacred relationship with her mother, it is also universal and serves as a reminder that our bodies don’t last  


LEAVING CERTIFICATE HIGHER LEVEL


435


Tracy K. Smith


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