 indifferent and was simply calling in a debt that had to be paid: ‘Death was thinking what it owed him:/ His ride beyond the body, its garments’. The speaker is philosophical; even though the things that were important to her father are listed seemingly without emotion, there is something poignant in these details that helps to capture his unique character. We learn that he sometimes felt inundated with taxes (‘the taxes that swarm each year’), cared about his car (‘The car and its fuel injection’), was a successful gardener (‘the fruit trees/ Heavy in his garden’) and liked browsing for power tools and watching TV. But Death inevitably ‘led him past/ The aisles of tools, the freezer lined with meat,/ The television saying over and over Seek// ’ because these are all tangible, earthly things. Her father would have no need of tools or a well-stocked freezer in death.


In stanza three, the speaker asks a profound rhetorical question: ‘So why do we insist/ He has vanished, that death ran off with our/ Everything worth having?’ Inbuilt into such a complex, sorrowful question is the beautiful and loving admission that this man, this father, was their ‘Everything worth having’. The next rhetorical question invites the reader to see the process of death differently: ‘Why not that he was/ Swimming only through this life—his slow,/ Graceful crawl, shoulders rippling,// Legs slicing away at the waves, gliding/ Further into what life itself denies?’ This poignant image of the father swimming slowly through life and gliding gracefully into death is eloquently expressed, meaning that we can easily envision it. These lines also have a peaceful, accepting tone. What life denies, of course, is death itself. Although death is inevitable, it is something that many of us are not comfortable confronting, and so we deny it for as long as we can.


The last three lines of this elegy are tender and beautiful. The speaker acknowledges that we don’t really know what happens when someone dies and that so much of it is beyond our human understanding: ‘He is only gone so far as we can tell.’ And yet, the memory of a loved one stays with us forever – we see this in the plaintive simile with which Smith concludes this moving elegy: ‘Though/ When I try, I see the white cloud of his hair/ In the distance like an eternity.’


476 VERSE 2025


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