earticle

영어

Through rereading English Renaissance & Modern poetry from the perspective of death, we can see that view of death varies depending on periods. English Renaissance poetry shows that people of the era stand faced with a sense of fear and anger towards death, -like a warrior who resists the tyrant, saying “I’ll feed on death that feeds on man.” Meanwhile English Renaissance people associate death with sin, although they want to be a overreacher, which reflects that English Renaissance people are obsessed with immortality. Christopher Marlowe’s and John Donne’s poems are the examples which show they are fully wrapped with will to live. Meanwhile the English modern poetry indicates that death is brought by the destruction of ecology by modern civilization rather than by the moral sin, accepting death as a routine in a friendly way and even praising death as the mother of beauty. Thus death is considered something acceptable rather than dreadful. D. H. Lawrence’s remarkably sensitive sensibility describes death in an aesthetic and scientific way while Emily Dickinson describes it in an ordinary and metaphysical way. In sum, English Renaissance poems are occupied with the will to live, which is also called “eros”, while English Modern ones are packed with the will to die, that is, “thanatos”.