Poem Analysis: Nothing But Death By Pablo Neruda

Nothing But Death Analysis. Nothing But Death, The poem from Pablo Neruda translated and edited by Robert Bly. The poem presented about the looks of the Death and about how the death appears around the human. There are seven stanzas in this poem and the techniques appeared in the poem are Imagery, Simile, Metaphor, and Alliteration. The imagery is the techniques used all over the seven stanzas in this poem to describe the image of the Death the movement, and the sound which included Auditory, Visual, and Kinetic. The First stanza described the environment in the cemeteries, the heart refers to the dead bodies in the graves and a tunnel could be coffins. The dead bodies sleeping in a tunnel which give the image of the coffin and in this stanza the poet also used a Simile in the last three lines by using word “like” and “as though.” The poet compared the graves like a shipwreck that is the death will take the human go down and drowning to the underground like the dead bodies in the graves. The last line “as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.” is like the rotting of the dead bodies. The second stanza there is one Simile in this

The pale dead refer to the phrase “woman that have dead hair,” “bakers who are as white as angels,” and “pensive young girls married to notary publics,” There is one Simile which is the bakers and angels, the poet compared the bakers that white as an angels. The woman and the bakers is describing the appearance of the dead person which related to “the pale dead”. In the sixth line, the phrase “the vertical river of the dead” is the same idea of Styx River. Michael Dawson (1997) notes that “A river that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead.” (para.1). Sailing the dead person to the river of the dead could be the Styx River that can notice from the phase “the river of dark people” the dark people refers to the dead