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Annotated by:
- Coulehan, Jack
- Date of entry: Jul-05-1999
Summary
The long journey towards oblivion has begun, the poet announces. "And it is time to go, to bid farewell / to one's own self." He then asks, "Have you built your ship of death, O have you?" Our bodies are dying, we are slipping away piece by piece. The only hope (if it is a hope) for us is to be prepared for death by building a "little ark" and stocking it with the essentials to carry us through "the dark flight down oblivion."
In this way we achieve "quietus." The poet visualizes launching his ship, which has no rudder, upon the sea of death, which has no ports. Yet, after drifting for a long time in darkness, "the little ship wings home" and "the body, like a worn sea-shell / emerges strange and lovely." [106 lines]
Primary Source
Selected Poems
Publisher
New Directions
Place Published
New York
Edition
1947
Editor
Kenneth Rexroth
Commentary
Lawrence wrote this poem when he was terminally ill from tuberculosis in late 1929 or 1930. There are several versions of "The Ship of Death" and of "Bavarian Gentians," another death-poem written around the same time. It appears that Lawrence kept re-working the same material, perhaps in this way building his own ship of death.
Building a metaphorical ship is one way to prepare for the ultimate journey. The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Christian "Ars Moriendi" of the Middle Ages are other forms of preparation. Our contemporary preference in the United States is to deny the approach of death and remain silent, while we allow our bodies to be impaled by machines in the name of "survival."