Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In Kevin Young's "The Mission," the poem explores the complex emotions surrounding mortality and loss, staged against the backdrop of a funeral home across the street. This becomes a lens through which the speaker meditates on the concept of death, connecting personal experience with broader existential questions. In delving into this intricate emotional terrain, Young offers a multi-layered study of how people negotiate the reality of death within the framework of daily life, community, and familial ties.

The opening lines establish a setting where death is an inescapable, constant presence. The speaker's rumination on Emily Dickinson's graveyard serves as a touchstone, aligning his own curiosity and perhaps ambivalence towards death with Dickinson's more poetic yet grim fascination. Death is "no concept," the poem asserts, but a physical, real occurrence. Unlike Dickinson's cold New England ground, the sun in the Mission district provides a contrasting, albeit paradoxical warmth to this landscape of mortality.

The poem introduces a sense of routine and normalcy with wakes described as less "disquiet than comfort." Children play, people gather, and life, paradoxically, goes on even in the face of death. The cars with low lights and people in secondhand suits paint a vivid, almost cinematic picture of collective mourning. Young expertly captures the subdued conversations and somber attire, all pointing toward a community that's come together to bear witness to someone's passing.

The poem then shifts its focus to the speaker's father, who has himself passed away, his letters "buoyed up among the untidy tide of his belongings." This personal angle adds depth to the earlier observations, bringing into sharper relief the weight of loss and absence. His father "kept everything but alive," a powerful statement about the ephemeral nature of life versus the tangible remnants we leave behind.

"Sorrow's not noun but verb," the poem declares, suggesting that sorrow is not merely a state of being but an action. There is a way to "do less" of it by "doing right," though what that means is left ambiguous. Could it mean acceptance? A form of constructive grieving? The lines that follow suggest a kind of resignation or adaptation to loss, akin to eyes adjusting to brightness or darkness.

The poem ends with the cars crawling away, representing the gradual departure of mourners and the fading memory of the deceased. It closes on a profound note of disorientation and ambiguity: "I could not see to see-." Is this a nod to Dickinson's "I could not see to see," a line that hovers in the realm of mortal vision, where seeing is both a realization and a blinding? Young leaves us with this dual sensation of clarity and obfuscation, pointing to the complex and contradictory emotions that surround the contemplation of death.

In its sophisticated structure and thematics, "The Mission" provides a nuanced portrayal of how death intersects with life. It moves fluidly from broad observations to intimate experiences, from sunlight to the dark interiors of grief. Through this balance, the poem articulates the complex processes by which people come to terms with mortality, both as a concept and as a palpable reality.

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