Metaphor: "At the Hospital" by David Ferry

David Ferry, a man with a creative brain that spills out beautiful poetry. Ferry is not only an American poet but also a translator and educator. He recently won the National Book Award for Poetry (2012) as well as the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (2000).

At the Hospital

 

She was the sentence the cancer spoke at last,

Its blurred grammar finally clarified.

 

David Ferry’s poem at the hospital is short yet contains a plethora of meaning. The poem’s effectiveness depends on its brevity. On the surface, the poem alludes to a death that was long awaited. The comparison that Ferry makes is between a person with cancer and a simple, short sentence. The hidden meaning of the poem is the brevity of life and how quick death itself can come upon us. The person that the speaker presents to us in the poem is not a human at all but is a simply sentence. The speaker does not compare the person to a novel or even a paragraph but simply one sentence. This sentence is ironically about the death sentence of cancer. The speaker concludes with “grammar finally clarified” (Line 2) meaning that the person’s death had cleared the uncertainty if the person would beat cancer or not. The word grammar here represents the questions of family, friends, and even the deceased on how it would end.

This metaphor of death is supported with irony and shock. The speaker does not show signs of remorse and remains completely detached; because of this the death shocks us. Ferry’s title “At the Hospital” even produces irony by associating hospitals not with health but instead with death. What is also ironic about this poem is the clarity that makes us feel remorse and possibly even regret for knowing. With death, many of us are always searching for answers to the question why here we have the answer but don’t want it. The irony is what helps to create the strong metaphor Ferry produces in this piece.