this will help them to forget their earthly lives
and attachments. But they are simultaneously
keeping those attachments alive by telling stories
and looking at photographs of the living.
Memory
If the river in the poem is interpreted to be the
river Lethe of ancient Greek mythology, the river
of forgetting, then the poem can be said to express
the tension between the knowledge of the dead
people that they must forget their lives on earth
and their desire to keep alive the memories of their
loved ones who remain alive. As they thirst, they
must drink, and as they must drink from the
Lethe, they must forget. But they determinedly
cling to their photographs of friends and relatives,
their stories of their lives on earth, and their expe-
rience of earthly love. These activities do not sat-
isfy their hunger and thirstfor earthly experiences:
They remain insatiable. The poem presents mem-
ory as something that both entraps the soul and
enchants it, that both keeps the dead from pro-
gressing and yet nourishes their hungry spirits.
Style
Irony
‘‘The Dead’’ depends for its dramatic effect on
surprising reversals of expectations. This results in
a literary device called situational irony, in which
what actually happens is the opposite of what
might be expected to happen.
There are at least two cases of situational
irony in the poem. In the first case, in everyday
life, what is expected to happen is that the dead are
silent and disappear from the world. What hap-
pens in the poem is that the dead are so active and
noisy that they wake the living from sleep. Thus
the poem subverts the cliche ́ expression, usually
applied to living people having parties or enjoying
raucous entertainment,to make enough noise to
wake the dead. Here, the dead make enough noise
to wake the living.
An extension of this idea of the vivid existence
of the dead is their physicality. Again, this is
counter to the usual notion of the afterlife. Some
people believe that the dead can continue to exist
on earth in the form of ghosts, souls that cannot
break their ties of attachment to earth. But gen-
erally, ghosts are considered intangible and barely
visible shadows of human beings. In contrast,
Mitchell shows the dead as having close and
tangible physical contact with the living, patting
their hands and telling their futures.
To what extent the living are aware of their
interactions with the dead is another question. It
is possible that the dead are effectively holding
fortune-telling sessions and storytelling parties all
around the living and that the living remain obliv-
ious to much of this activity. The fact that the living
are awakened by at least some of the dead’s activ-
ities shows that they are aware of them on some
level. But the question of exactly what the living
perceive and understand when they are awakened
by the dead is not explicitly answered. Perhaps the
living interpret the cause of their awakening as odd
sensations, ghosts, disturbing memories or dreams
about their dead relatives or simply poor sleep. But
the poet is in no doubt. The cause of the dead’s
rousing of the living is as straightforward and
obvious as the episodes when the dead, then still
living, woke the children sleeping upstairs with
their noisy all-night drinking parties.
The second case of situational irony concerns
the role of the river in the poem. This river, from
which the dead drink, is suggestive of the Lethe of
Greek mythology, the river of forgetting or obliv-
ion, which was located in Hades, the underworld
and abode of the dead. The Greeks believed that
some people who died on earth drank repeatedly
from the Lethe, thus forgetting their lives on earth.
Mitchell reverses this idea, showing the dead
drinking from the river but determinedly fighting
against the process of forgetting. They do their
best to continue their relationships with the living
and to keep the connections strong. The thirst
referred to in line 1, therefore, becomes not just
a literal thirst for water but a metaphorical thirst
for continuing contact with the living. Also, the
reference to the dead (lines 8–9) as being hungry
for signs of their love for the living suggests that
they do not want to forget. Instead, they feed their
appetite for contact with their loved ones with
photographs and stories about them.
These examples of irony have the effect of
shocking the reader into seeing death in a new
way. Rather than an ending, death is presented as
the beginning of another phase of life, complete
with physical being, emotions, desires, and all the
elements of earthly life.Metaphor
‘‘The Dead’’ uses metaphors (a metaphor is a
comparison not using the wordslikeorasto con-
vey the spiritual and emotional state of the dead).The Dead