Death As A Mission

Kevin Young’s “The Mission” employs enjambment, life and death imagery and irony to portray the life of the living amongst the dead. The juxtaposition of moving beings and lifeless objects exposes the frivolity of grievance and the reluctance of accepting human’s final end. Young uses couplets which serve as concise and piercing pieces to the poem’s entirety, supporting the duality of existence described by the author.

The first couplets of the poem serve to contextualize the narrator’s experience with death, providing enough details to notice his fascination with the subject. The author juxtaposes the “funerals” with “afternoons,” showing the resemblance of the time of day with the death of a living being. Repetition plays an important role in the poem’s structure. Young describes how “soul / after soul” was “pour[ed] / into the cold / New England ground.” The structure of the couplets forces the reader to quickly move his eyes from one line to the next, mirroring the continual flow of people dying. The insignificance of each death, the lack of individual attention to each individual reveals the frivolity of burial.

Similarly, Young describes different actions within the same sentence with opposite adjectives, ironically portraying death. He states that while “children played tag / out front [. . .] bodies / snuck in the back.” The continual burial of bodies, juxtaposed with the children playing create an eerie sensation. The poem uses comic appeal to break the tension and anxiety caused by the discussion of death when describing how “the secondhand suits / that fathers, or sons / now orphans, had rescued / out of closets, praying / they still fit.” The enjambment between the words “suits” and “that”, “sons” and “now”, and “rescued” and “out” maintain the line of thought and provide a complete message.

Furthermore, the poem uses the damage of the “home’s clock,” the “Mornings” and the “dead / of night” to expose the significance of time in the death of a human being. It also creates a sequence from the moment in which the clock stops ticking, symbolizing death, to the mourning or grievance, represented by the word “Morning” and the subsequent forgetting of the human being, shown by the obscurity and solitude of the night. The grievance of death, is finally exposed by the ironical “sorrow’s / not noun / but verb, something / that, unlike living, / by doing right / you do less of.” The structure of the poem provides for a falling and curved path of words, much like the grieving process. Young emphasizes the word “sorrow” which receives its separate line, as though it were to much for it to handle.

The juxtaposition of living and dead objects, the ironical comic relief and enjambment provide a greater meaning to the poem. The ease with which the structure deals with the subjects of death and grievance portrays the poet’s approach to a human’s final moments. Repetition and descriptions of normal, routinely activities give the poem a sense of casualness and consolation during discussions of delicate topics.