Essay Sample on Loss: The World Won't Look Back

Introduction

Are you relieved now that you've taken everything away from me? In a Korean film "Sunflower," Taesik is the main character who experiences a serious loss: the death of his mother and a younger sister. He used to be in a gang, involving in incidents such as a robbery and a group fight at the beginning of the film. Later in the movie, he is determined to live a purposeful life by earning money from work, and he chooses to leave the group. Knowing that Taesik left their group, the gang murders his family. Although he just lost some of his precious people, the street on the way back to his house didn't seem any more different, and he trudges on the street, feeling an unbearable pain from his loss. Just like Taesik's experience, Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poet who wrote a poem "Song of a Second April" and Laure-Anne Bosselaar, a poet who wrote a poem "Rooms Remembered" focus on the idea that the world moves on as loss continues to linger in an individual.

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In the poem, "Song of a Second April," Millay utilizes metaphor of the natural world to contrast the narrator and the outside world, and she also puts a shift in the poem for a change in the speaker's point of view. The first two stanzas depict April which stays unchanged throughout the time, "April this year, not otherwise, than April of a year ago" (Millay 1-2). From the line, the readers can infer that Millay, treating all Aprils the same, will be displaying similar characteristics of the Aprils throughout the poem. She creates a vivid image of April which "is full of whispers, full of sighs, of dazzling mud and dingy snow" (Millay 3-4), where "The men are merry at their chores, And children earnest at their play" (Millay 11-12). Depicting Aprils with peaceful mood, Millay shows how the outside world shows beauty and perfection. In the end, Millay puts a shift from looking at the surroundings to the speaker realizing that nothing has been changed except that "only you are gone, you that alone I cared to keep" (Millay 18). She expresses a deep sorrow about the loss and emphasizes the sense of longing by stating, "only you" (Millay 18). This is the moment in the poem where the narrator realizes the difference between herself and the surroundings. Millay also portrays this idea through connecting the speaker to the brooks and the outside world to the streams, "The larger streams run still, and deep, Noisy and swift the small brooks run" (Millay 13-14). In the poem, the larger streams, represented as the world around the speaker, only move "still and deep," (Millay 13) because the world doesn't change for a single loss; the size of her loss is negligible considering the vastness of the world. Whereas, the small brooks, interpreted as the speaker, run "noisy and swift," (Millay 14) illustrating the frustration that her mind undergoes and the fluctuation in her emotion. Through the use of the metaphor of the natural world and the shift in the speaker's viewpoint, Millay underscores the fact that the world carries on like one's loss means nothing.

Similar to Millay, Laure-Anne Bosselaar crafted a poem called "Rooms Remembered," and in the poem, she uses imagery of reminiscence and repetition of a specific phrase to portray how the world stays constant as the loss lingers in an individual. The poem elaborates on the emotion that the speaker expresses inside a room that she and her partner had shared. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker discloses the death of her lover, "I needed, for months after he died, to remember our rooms" (Bosselaar 1). This first line sets the tone of the poem by showing the narrator's sadness about her loss to the readers. She recurs to the memories with her lover, and points out the table inside the room, "I remembered table of laughter" ((Bosselaar 7). The table did not change throughout the entire time she's been living in the room; nonetheless, after the speaker's partner had left, she discovers another layer of precious memory on top of the table. Although the sentence itself contains five words, it generates a vivid image of the scene where she and her partner chat and laugh together at the table. Similarly, the narrator wrote "But tonight, as I stand in the doorway to his room & stare at dusk settled there, what I remember best is how to throw my arms around his neck, I needed to stand on the top of my toes" ((Bosselaar 13-16). The narrator uses the example in the poem to shows her change in thoughts and attitude over time although the surroundings stay the same. After the death of her lover, she only recalls the specific moments that are precious to her when looking at the objects in the room. In addition to that, Bosselaar displays the speaker's grief with repetition in order to illustrate the lingering of loss in her. Looking at the place, she remembers "rooms where friends lingered, rooms with our beds, with our books, rooms with the curtain I sewed" ((Bosselaar 5-6). By repeating a phrase, "rooms where" ((Bosselaar 5) and "rooms with" ((Bosselaar 6) Bosselaar reminds the readers how much the speaker reminisces the room with the presence of her lover. Using both rich imageries of reminiscence and phrase repetition, Bosselaar successfully emphasizes the idea that loss stays in one's mind while the world moves forward.

Conclusion

Whether it's heavy or light, in time and space, people experience loss irrespective of their social status, background or origin. It encompasses pain, frustrations, and lingering memories that prevalently corners people in substantial depression. But the world does not stop for their loss; it moves on. Therefore, people should establish strategies to overcome or at least forget about their past losses and live in the present moment. If they let loss stay in their heart, then they will remain in the past, devastated and wondering as life continues.

Work Cited

Bosselaar, Laure-Anne. Rooms Remembered. Poets.org, Academy of American Poets. 7 Oct. 2015. Available at<www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/rooms-remembered>accessed on 28th November 2018

Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Song of a Second April. Publisher Not Identified, 1930.