The Ultimate Question

The Ultimate Question

Robert Cody said, “Have the courage to live. Anyone can die.” This quote means that the importance of life is to be strong and to never give up. Throughout history, men have constantly questioned death because it remains such an unknown to them. Death is an unanswered question: the following poems attempt to answer death according to the philosophies of their respective authors. These authors seek the answer to death because certainty of what happens during and after death is more comfortable and less scary than uncertainty. Death still remains an argument that is timeless even through to modern –day times. The poems Robert Frost’s “After Apple Picking,” William Butler Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” and William Shakespeare’s excerpt from Hamlet all try to answer the ultimate philosophical question about death.

In the poem “After Apple Picking” by Robert Frost, tone, religion, and regret all play a part in the author’s prospective answer about death. The tone of this poem is very negative and depressing because he relates death to winter, which evokes thoughts of darkness and ending (Frost 7). The author is tired of life and ready to die, which is apparent from his first person point of view throughout the poem. Because of “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree/ Toward heaven still,” the reader can assume that Frost holds religious beliefs and some kind of undetermined faith (Frost 1-2). Apple-Picking symbolizes living life and when author refers to his empty barrel, it symbolizes regret because he did not fill each barrels with apples during his life time (Frost 3). In Frost’s attempt to answer the question, all he really does is question it more.

Although the poem “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats has the same theme as in “After Apple Picking,” it has a totally different perspective about death. In the poem “Sailing Byzantium” by Yeats, the author attempts to answer the philosophical question about death by using a very positive tone, religion, and dividing the poem into sections that resembles the process of life and death. The tone of “Sailing to Byzantium” is very positive. Although the author thinks of himself as an old man that is unappreciated by society, he is very hopeful about death and believes that he is going to heaven. In the line “A tattered coat upon a stick…,” Yeats views himself as man that is coming to the termination of life and he is ready to “Sail to Byzantium” (Yeats 10). Yeats visions Byzantium as heaven, a perfect society where “Unity of Being” is achieved. The reader can depict that Yeats is a very religious man because he has faith that when he dies, he is going to go to a better place, which is heaven. Yeats divides the poem into sections, which have different ideas in them. The first stanza is about the life cycle, the second is about the end

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