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.
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