Death Sentences (Criticism)

Criticism

Scott Trudell

Trudell is an independent scholar with a bachelor's degree in English literature. In the following essay, Trudell discusses Lazić's commentary on love, sex, and desire, arguing that the opening poem of A Wake for the Living establishes the paradoxical view of love that the poet will explore throughout the collection.

"Death Sentences," the first poem in A Wake for the Living, is an extremely effective opener. It draws in the reader with the exciting and joyous moment of the speaker finding the "eternity" of her lover's "arms around [her] neck." Since this moment is also a "death sentence," however, it establishes a complex paradox about sex, desire, death, and life that leads readers, intrigued, to follow these themes throughout Lazić's collection. The book is full of such paradoxes; it juxtaposes images of death and despair with those of life and joy until they become profoundly confused, and the poems consistently view these contradictions in terms of sex and desire. This essay will argue that the central paradox of "Death Sentences," that death and despair coexist with sexual and romantic joy, is a crucial revelation that reappears throughout A Wake for the Living.

Critics such as Edward Hirsch recognize this "dialectic," as Hirsch calls it in his December 2003 Washington Post column, as one of Lazić's central themes:

There is a kind of dialectic operating in Lazić's work between irony and ecstasy, between the wisdom of long experience, which teaches her that "the time of miracles is behind us," and the innocence of fresh desire, which keeps surprising her with its bright insistence.

In "Death Sentences," this dialectic at first appears to be a debate between old and new ideas of sex, love, desire, and intimate relationships. Thus, Ophelia is associated with drowning in old conventions while the speaker and her ideas about free love are associated with feminism and contemporary relationships. During the course of the poem, Ophelia's traditional, oppressed, outmoded idea of romantic love seems to give way to the new possibilities of a liberated female spirit.

Indeed, Lazić makes it clear, here and in poems such as "Evergreen," that she is a proponent of feminism and free love with no desire to return to the oppressive conditions of the past. "Evergreen" attacks the many varieties of women like Ophelia who Lazić disdains: "I've had enough of lonely women. / Sad. Miserable. Abandoned women." The speaker of this poem stresses that she wants nothing to do with "faithful wives with their eyes lowered" and their lovers, who are "Loved to death till death do us part." Instead of this inhibited romanticism, Lazić imagines a kind of love after death "do us part," in which she jumps "Into everyone's throat or heart, / So I can be born again in labor pains."

It is interesting that this liberated idea of love is so closely associated with violence and death; its final image is the decapitated head of the speaker's lover on her belly, like the biblical image of the severed head of John the Baptist that Salome requests to be brought to her on a plate. This is a startling and somewhat confusing image, introduced by the paradox "I'd do everything the same way and everything differently," as though the speaker would like to act out the traditional and historical attitudes toward love after all, both as they have been acted out in the past and in new, different ways. Unsure how to interpret these lines, the reader is left contemplating a paradox in which two kinds of love that initially seemed nothing alike are revealed to be quite similar. Although a modern view of love seems more joyful and desirable, both types are closely tied to death and hopelessness.

"Death Sentences" reveals a similarly difficult and troubling paradox in its final stanza. It is true that Ophelia's idea of sexual desire — a classic example of the idealized, romanticized, oppressed, and inhibited love that, in times past, a woman was meant to feel for a man — is presented as something outdated and undesirable. Yet the fact remains that the speaker's idea of love is also a "death sentence" in which her lover's arms are around her neck like the noose of a hanging rope. Lazić envisions this mature idea of love, in which the speaker's dress falls from her body like leaves fall from the trees, as an "eternity" of winter.

The poem, therefore, is not a dialectic between two different ideas of love, one of them associated with death and the other with life, as much as one vision of love in which death and life are varying, coexisting forces. Ophelia and the speaker are both faced with hopeless death sentences, and the main distinction is that the speaker prefers to enjoy life while it lasts. The speaker also wishes to be free of the oppressive, male-dominated conventions of the past, but Lazić implies that this may not be possible. If the speaker were truly free from these conventions, Lazić would be unlikely to portray the man taking off her dress like the wind shaking off the leaves "without permission," as though the wind were the same kind of overwhelming natural force as the water that drowns Ophelia. Indeed, the image of Ophelia "entangled in seaweeds" is similar to the speaker entangled in her lovers arms; both of these tentacle-like objects seem to be instruments carrying out the women's death sentences.

"Come and Lie Next to Me" is another poem that brings up problems that Lazić recognizes in so-called free love, and it emphasizes perhaps more explicitly, but with some of the same imagery as that of "Death Sentences," that all types of love involve paradoxical extremes of life, death, joy, and despair. The reader knows that the type of love in "Come and Lie Next to Me" is liberated, mature love because the speaker says, "I need your love muscle only," stressing that she has no romantic illusions. Yet this type of love is like Ophelia's in the sense that it is self-sacrificial and demeaning: "I give you my body on credit, / My soul on the layaway plan." Although this implies that the speaker will regain her body and soul, it is nevertheless an image of subservience, and the poem's final couplet reinforces this sense of inequality: "Outside the leaves are falling / Like meat from the bone."

However much Lazić's speaker is a carnivore who desires to take advantage of her lover as much as he takes advantage of her, the fact remains that love is consistently outside the realm of "Truth and justice, the higher pursuits," which in "Come and Lie Next to Me" were "invented / So they can separate us." Whenever Lazić condemns traditional conventions of love, as she does with marriage in "Conjugal Bed," she also recognizes that all love is in some way conventional, and all relationships contain an element of violent and oppressive deadliness. This is why the Shakespearean reference in "Conjugal Bed," like the reference to Hamlet and Ophelia in "Death Sentence," is a confusing paradox:

This bed is not a grave for us to lie in.

Neither are we Romeo and Juliet

For tears to be shed over our corpses,

And giving a wake for the living is intolerable.

Although Lazić is sincere in her condemnation of Romeo and Juliet's naive, idealistic, deadly love, she is somewhat ironic about the speaker's statement that a wake for the living is "intolerable." Her collection implies by its title that its poems will be like "A Wake for the Living," and the title does, in fact, turn out to be an apt description of Lazić's paradoxical themes, particularly those of sex and love. Throughout the book, love is like a wake for the living in the sense that it brings a ritual of death into the experience of life. Lazić also implies, however, that love brings life into death, since a wake is a final moment to experience the semblance of life in a dead body. While she continually portrays the middle-aged female desire for sex as something that brings joy and life into a woman's world, Lazić simultaneously stresses that middle-aged sex is like acting out a despairing and hopeless "funeral march," as it is called in "Evergreen."

The remarkable thing about "Death Sentences" is that within five short stanzas it so effectively establishes this complex and paradoxical notion of love, sex, and desire, which will recur throughout A Wake for the Living. Lazić is able to accomplish this partly by repeatedly introducing paradoxes into the poem, beginning with the contradictory idea she was born too late and yet is too old to be like Ophelia. The paradoxes continue in stanzas 2 and 3, where the imagery is carefully balanced between romanticized metaphor and gruesome reality, with juxtaposed phrases like "floating water lilies" and "floating eyes." The imagery of Ophelia floating like an amphora entangled in the seaweeds continues to emphasize this sense of contradiction, since it is unclear whether this ancient, precious object is submerged and drowned or simply floating within the weedy tentacles.

In stanza 4, Lazić introduces the image of the speaker naked like a barren willow tree that the wind has stripped of its leaves. There seems to be a contradiction because the speaker prefers that her lover take off her dress, but the wind seems to purposefully shake the tree and make it bare "without permission," suggesting that the wind/lover has taken advantage or used force even though to the wind/lover it seems "As if there's nothing to it."

Finally, Lazić presents the key contradiction of the poem: that this new, free love is joyous and filled with pleasure at the same time as it is an eternal "death sentence," with the lover's arms around the speaker's neck both as a noose and as a passionate embrace. All of this imagery suggests that love is not a straightforward struggle between joy and cynicism, life and death, good and evil, but an expression of wonderment that all of these ideas coexist in a paradoxical manner. After she has established this paradox of love, sex, and desire, Lazić is free to explore these themes throughout the rest of the collection, using "Death Sentences" as a keynote for the true nature of love.

Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on "Death Sentences," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Laura Carter

Carter is currently working as freelance writer. In this essay, Carter considers the author's powerful use of imagery and language to transcend her own perceptions of death.

A simple reading of Radmila Lazić's "Death Sentences" reveals an interesting, often surreal look into the realm of death. But to simply view the work as a juxtaposition or side-by-side comparison of death to that of a Shakespearean tragedy is a careless underestimation of the emotive and spiritual power that lies beneath the work's surface. Upon closer examination of what appear to be innocuous or bland symbols, the poem takes on a psychological, emotional, and spiritual depth in its exploration of death, hitting a nerve that taps into the very pulse of human experience.

Lazić's poem begins with a paradox. The speaker cannot go back in time; her dilemma, that she "was born too late" yet she is "much too old," presents the reader with a riddle to solve. The answer lies in the Elizabethan references appearing in the two lines immediately following in stanza 1. Addressing Shakespeare's "Hamlet," the speaker wryly acknowledges that she could never fit the role of a "pimply Ophelia." These three lines mirror the complexities of the Shakespearean tragedy. Like the speaker, Hamlet often spoke in riddles. In fact, one of the major themes of the play involves the idea of appearances versus reality. There is an underlying madness to the play and as the audience discovers, the truth is often elusive. Hamlet's father's death, for example, is made to look like an accident but is really a well-planned murder. Likewise, Prince Hamlet's ascent to the throne is on the surface logical, but the audience soon learns that he is a murderer. Finally, it is Hamlet's feigned or contrived madness that serves to drive Ophelia to insanity and eventually death.

To begin a contemplation of death with this particular Shakespearean reference is fitting to the topic. It is in Hamlet that the question of existence and death is raised in act 3, scene 1: "To be, or not to be; that is the question." Throughout the play, Shakespeare challenges notions of death. In act 1, scene 2, Shakespeare asserts, "All that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity." Death is explored not only in the brutal murders of several people but in the tragic death of Ophelia, who, it could be argued, was murdered by Hamlet's deceptions. For instance, it is in her madness that Ophelia passes out flowers. Particularly significant is the rosemary she gives to Laertes, a symbol of remembrance used in funerals, foreshadowing her own death in asking her brother not to forget her. It is in this state of madness that Ophelia dies. The tragedy of death, including Ophelia's, pervades much of the play, leaving the audience to sort out, and make sense of, not only a series of brutal murders but the death of a young, innocent, lovesick girl.

In stanzas 2 and 3 of Lazić's poem, the speaker's contemplation of death continues in a series of images of her body eerily floating in dark waters, from its fishlike glide amongst shimmering fish bodies, to its final submergence in the water, like a dead seashell or a shipwreck. The references in stanza 2 again stir up memories of the play for the reader. The speaker's body is described as a ghostly apparition suspended in the water, alluding to the ghosts that haunt Prince Hamlet. Like the speaker's body, Ophelia's also found its watery grave. In act 4, scene 7 of Shakespeare's play, Ophelia, attempting to hang floral wreaths from a tree overlooking a pond, falls in and sinks into its muddy depths, eventually pulled down by the weight of her water-soaked clothing. The speaker of the poem recalls the death of Ophelia, her lifeless body submerged in the pond, likening it to "shipwrecks of love."

The speaker visits the Shakespearean tragedy, not to identify with the drowning victim, but to emphasize her own relationship with death. Ophelia died a young, beautiful, innocent woman who was tragically in love. In the end, it was Ophelia's love for Hamlet that literally drove her mad. In consideration of Ophelia's tragedy, the speaker of the poem, on speaking of her own death, is quick to suggest that she is no "pimply Ophelia." The reference betrays Ophelia's immaturity and is used by the speaker to contrast or compare herself to the young tragic figure. It serves to emphasize the speaker's age and wisdom, suggesting that perhaps because of her age not only would she not suffer death in the same manner but that her death would not be a tragedy. She acknowledges that her death will not be an untimely event, like Ophelia's, but a logical consequence of age.

The speaker's meaning in this clever yet powerful juxtaposition (or side-by-side comparison) of her impending death with Shakespeare's tragedy is also asserted in stanza 3, line 4, when the speaker identifies herself as "I, the amphora," which "Burrow[s] in sand next to shipwrecks of love." Amphora, often mentioned in ancient Greek literature, were tall, slender vessels used by the Greeks for the preservation of wine, oil, honey, and fruits that required special keeping. They were also used for cinerary urns, or vessels housing cremated remains of the dead. Their pointed bases were purposely designed as a foothold to position them upright in the sand or soil. This image serves to contrast the "shipwreck of love" or tragic accident that characterized Ophelia's death. The speaker identifies herself not with the shipwreck but with the dual image of the amphora, one of a stately vessel housing a delicate wine or "treasure" that only gets finer with age; the other, a ceremonial vessel housing her own remains. The amphora was created for a specific intent or use and, by extension, the speaker's identification with the Greek object solidifies the assertion that her death is to be expected.

In drawing a parallel to Shakespeare's Hamlet with respect to Lazić's work, the initial interpretation would be to view "Death Sentences" as one poet's morbid resignation to the inevitability of death. Certainly, on the surface, the speaker paints a bleak picture. The speaker's lamentation in the opening lines of the poem, particularly the first line of stanza 1, is a paradox out of time, out of sync, mimicking the timelessness of death and the incomprehensible interruption this event can create. Through the eyes of the speaker, death in the poem comes to the reader much like an old photograph, a collection of dull hues, of browns, silvers, and dark greens, of flattened wheat, glimmering fish and floating lily pads. Redemption does come for the speaker in stanzas 4 and 5. She welcomes death as if it were a lover holding her in a sensual embrace, preferring death to come "take off my dress," imagining it falling at her "feet like aspen leaves," her death sentence an "Eternity of your arms around my neck."

Returning to stanza 2 of the poem illuminates the speaker's ecstatic experience with death at the end of the work. Significantly, her body is described as having "upset the floating water lilies." The image of the water lily, or the lotus, is a powerful religious symbol. In its natural state, the lotus flower is rooted in the depths of muddy ponds or swamps, its dark green leaves floating on the surface. The lotus emerges from its muddy depths to the surface where it blossoms into a pure white flower. It has been said to symbolize the manifestation of the universal Buddha nature or Christ Consciousness inherent equally in all life, universal images of immortality and resurrection. It is a symbol of spiritual evolvement. Particularly, Buddhist and Hindu deities are often portrayed holding a lotus blossom or are seated on a lotus; therefore, it is associated with achieving one's highest potential in the spiritual world. Amanda F. Rooke says in "The Lotus,"

Lotus relate to creation, regeneration, and the state of the initiative and higher beings, all of whom travel through life's vicissitudes and trials to become at one with the creative source of life in order to return and spread its light to other receptive souls.

The "aspen leaves" mentioned in stanza 4 are an equally important mystical symbol in the work. Universally the aspen leaf is traditionally associated with an excess of sensibility and fear. According to Christian folklore, for example, all of the trees bowed in sorrow when Christ was crucified, with the exception of the aspen, whose pride and arrogance doomed its leaves to eternal trembling.

Considering the powerful symbolism behind the lotus and the aspen leaves leads the reader to another conclusion. Reexamining the poem, the reader experiences a marked shift between the first three stanzas and the last two. The work begins in resignation as the speaker laments certain death. By the end of the work, the redemptive powers of the dark waters in which she was submerged have taken effect, her view of death moving from one of sorrow to great elation. At this point, the speaker reaches her own enlightenment; she is, in a sense, reborn. A religious reading of the poem reveals a woman who in the end is welcoming her death as if she were recalling the Rapture, or Christ's return, with the open arms of an eager lover. The poem abruptly shifts as she willingly sheds her fear, symbolized in the effortless shedding of her dress "like aspen leaves." Her death sentence is no sentence at all but the promise of an eternity of bliss in the loving arms of Christ.

Radmila Lazić's "Death Sentences" fittingly ends in mimicking the very words of Shakespeare in Measure for Measure who states "If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride and hug it in mine arms." This quote mirrors a determination on Shakespeare's part to welcome death as a new and exciting experience. So, too, does Lazić's work. The poem beautifully moves through the speaker's own fear and grief concerning her impending death, past acceptance to a state of excitement and bliss as she contemplates her adventure into a new realm. The complexities and economies of language and of imagery illuminate the psychological, emotional, and spiritual depths to which the poet so artfully submerges herself to explain a realm beyond human comprehension, encouraging readers to join her with open arms.

Source: Laura Carter, Critical Essay on "Death Sentences," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

What Do I Read Next?

• Shakespeare's Hamlet (1601) is one of the most important plays of all time and one of literature's most profound meditations on meaning, existence, and numerous other themes. It tells the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and his struggle to avenge his father's murder.
• Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1995), by clinical psychologist Mary Pipher, describes the difficult and oppressive world that young girls face in contemporary American society and offers suggestions about how to support them.
• Contemporary Yugoslav Poetry (1977), translated by Charles Simic and edited by Vasa D. Mihailovich, is a good source for exploring some of the best post – World War II Yugoslavian poets, such as Matija Beckovic and Milos Crnjanski.
• Charles Simic's Pulitzer Prize – winning The World Doesn't End (1989) is an innovative collection of untitled prose poems that refer to numerous historical, religious, and philosophical figures.