ANALYSIS- SHIP OF DEATH

Ship of Death” is composed of 107 lines, divided into ten sections of

varying lengths (section 4 has four lines, section 7 twenty-five lines).
The poem is written in free verse in elegiac form. The title refers to the
ancient burial practice of placing a model ship in the tomb with the
corpse to carry the soul to heaven.

Section 1 describes the time of death as autumn, when apples fall and
their seeds are dropped into the earth through the rotting fruit. Each
person passes through such a period of autumn, as the person undergoes
a separation of self from self. Each must prepare for such a separation.
Thus, section 2 calls upon all (“you,” the readers) to build a ship of
death, because the season of frost has arrived and apples are ready to
fall. The smell of death is in the air, and the soul cowers within the cold
body.

Section 3 questions the success of suicide, refusing to believe that the

murder of one’s self could be rewarded with the desired tranquillity of
death. Instead, section 4 asserts, one should rely upon one’s experience
of the peace that comes from “a strong heart.” This is the kind of quiet
that one hopes for, and it cannot be had through suicide.

The task of all is, therefore, to begin to prepare for the death that is a
part of natural process, for the fall from life that is like the fall of the ripe
apple in autumn. Each should build a ship of death for the long journey
into “oblivion.” Each can experience in the body the decline of nature as
a bruising of being, as a passage of the soul from the weakening body.
Time and space are experienced by the aging body as the buffeting of
ocean waves against the beach; it is upon that limitless ocean, whose
sources come from beyond time and space, that the ship of death will be
launched.

The body breaks up and falls into pieces in section 6, where the soul
discovers that it cannot find anything solid outside its body. The flood
waters are death-waters, now within as well as without the body. The
soul is increasingly frightened, huddling in terror as it waits the final
annihilating waves of destruction.

“We are dying, we are dying,” the poem says; since we are dying all the
time, we can only resign ourselves to the inevitability of the end. We
must help the soul by building a ship for it to cross the ocean of death;
we must put aboard it the implements of life, “food/ and little dishes,”
for comfort of the frightened soul. One departs the body as a soul
launched upon a ship that has no destiny, no charts to guide it, and no
means to steer it upon the dark waters of death. In the deepening
darkness, both the soul and the ship disappear as they drift without
direction and fall into nothing, toward “nowhere.”

Section 8 is a surrender, an absolute resignation to the disappearance of

all: Both body and ship are “gone, entirely gone.” The end has been
reached, and the end “is oblivion.” When all has sunk into nothing,
something occurs. Section 9 is a break in the plane of oblivion, as “a
thread” of light stretches itself out to make a horizon, to open a space for
new consciousness. The stunned speaker is uncertain of what can be
believed: “Is it illusion?” Then the thread of light “fumes” into a
broader, dawn-like light. Suddenly, the ship is sighted, drifting beneath
the gray light. Then the light turns yellow, and finally it is rose-colored;
“The whole thing starts again.”

The flooding waters of death subside to open section 10. A “frail soul,”
beaten and disoriented by the darksome voyage, leaves the ship and
steps into a shell-like body waiting for its return. The ship returns upon
the sea as the soul reenters its body. The soul now finds the peace of
oblivion in its bodily being. This is what awaits the person who builds
the ship of death, so each should begin to build what each will need to
cross waters of death for the peace of oblivion.