Memento Mori Essay Example

perspective of the ongoing cycle of life, the achievements of human beings are transient; an ancient perception, but as delivered by this fellow, without resonance.

True, the grave does indeed outlive the maker but the gravedigger's words delve no deeper than superficial farce. They convey no sense that his perception of death has altered his attitude towards life, that it has had an internal impact. And it has not had on him such transformative impact because he has looked at death from within only the narrow framework of his daily labour and not from within the only framework that will define it in its reality: the trajectory of the individual life and the inherent fruitlessness of the human condition. Andrew Marvell makes a similar point in his poem 'To his coy Mistress' in which the threat of death is used as a seductive ploy; an association which, seemingly, carries no moral message for mankind of significance. Arguably the speaker, unlike the Clowns, appears to have been fundamentally changed by his contemplation of death evoking the language of philosophy ('..

.we cannot make our sun') in recognition of mans mortality. Yet such philosophical argument is parodied by Marvell in his use of an antithetic romantic denouement, likening the passing of time to the devouring qualities of 'am'rous birds of prey'.The Prince, Hamlet, will supply that larger framework, but will reach a conclusion that initially it seems does not differ from that of the gravedigger or the male seducer in Marvell's poem. Hamlet enters and is greeted by that most typical memento mori, a human skull, thrown up from the grave by the gravedigger. Hamlet handles it and speculates

on the part it played when fully fleshed and alive, ascribing it to the roles of politician and courtier amongst others.

Such association are trite, nonetheless, as the Prince comments with wit on the vanity of such human endeavour in the face of an all - consuming nature of death. Stephen too, in Sebastien Faulks, 'Birdsong', comments on this feature of mortality whilst observing the 'natural beauty' of the Somme watergardens, likening death to a 'vegetable fertility', to suggest the fragility of natural things as much as the plenitude of such an occurrence in everyday life. Though all three recognise the ultimate futility of human action, Hamlet and Stephen place their perceptions in a framework more comprehensive and meaningful than that supplied by the gravedigger. While Hamlet transplants his perceptions onto the various professions Stephen comments on how 'all of them...

would be taken back by this earth', displacing his views on death to the landscape around him in a way that is reminiscent of the Romantic and Gothic genres of the Eighteenth and Ninceteenth Century in which emotions thought to be too emotionally charged for 'proper' representation were instead inhabited by the forces of nature.Emily Bronte's description of her central male protagonist, Heathcliff's mind, in her novel 'Wuthering Heights', as an 'arid furze of whinstone' serves as an example of this. The focus on the brute fact of death the gravedigger again displays in a response to a question put to him by Hamlet: 'How long will a man lie i' th' earth ere he rot?' The Clowns reply is blunt and unflinching '...a will last you some eight year or nine year.

A tanner

will last you nine year'. Why a tanner? Hamlet asks. 'Why sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade that 'a will keep out water a great while, and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body'. With no attempt to sanatise its brute reality, the gravedigger, engrossed in his occupation, confronts that facticity of death. But in doing so he dispenses with all interpretations of death, completely materialising it.

His comments on his trade, graves and their occupants imply no human attempt to face the all encompassing mortality. In Marvell's speaker we may hazard an uplifting message from his desire to 'at once our time devour', seizing the moments of life we have left. The use of the conditional tense at the beginning of the poem and Marvell's choice to close in the present participle indicates a lengthy procrastination of meaning surrounding the theme of death and a decisive conclusion as the speaker wrestles with the concept of mortality. No such message or conclusion, however, may be found in the gravedigger's commentary. Death for him is a literal fact, an inescapable reality beyond his comprehension and thus he has not even the slightest inclination to meditate on its significance.