Fear And Trembling, By Søren Kierkegaard

In the twenty-second chapter of Genesis we find related the events of "the time when God put Abraham to the test" (Gen 22:1). God commands Abraham to take his only son Isaac to the land of Moriah and to "offer him as a sacrifice" (Gen 22:2-3). In his famous book Fear and Trembling Søren Kierkegaard discusses how is that decision to be categorized in ethical terms, or can it be expressed in such terms at all? In Kierkegaard's narration the story of Abraham and Isaac is clearly a story about the relationship between the life of sacrifice and the religious life. He aims to makes us understand the important nature of faith and ethics and also relationship between god and individuals. As Kierkegaard says about true faith in Fear and Trembling that "Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith"(Kierkegaard.46 ) One of the poets who display this sense of loss so clear and eloquent is Elizabeth Bishop.

According to the Norton Anthology, Bishop was born into a life of loss, and little changed as she grew into adulthood. Bishop portrays her society through her ability to lose everything and still be grateful for the strength that enables her to regain from these losses. Perhaps one of the most repellent poems of Bishop, in terms of loss, is entitled “One Art”. This poem is all about losing, and to Bishop, it seems that loss is kind of art that must be mastered. From losing keys to lost memories and names, to family heritage and old homes and cities, the list of things the narrator has lost in her life get progressively more serious. Finally, in the last stanza, she states that even losing the person that is assumed to be her lover was