Essay on personal feeling

Great works of literary art encourage us to ask questions about life. Historic disasters,
such as this Coronavirus / COVID-19 pandemic, force us to ask questions about the one, certain,
inevitable truth. There is no questioning the fact that every living being will die.
As we currently learn about people dying in such very high numbers and at such a very
fast rate, most of us are asking questions about our own lives and deaths, the lives and deaths of
our loved ones, maybe even the beginning and eventual end of human beings on this planet. We
are asking questions about the meaning or purpose and value of life, and about how—not if or
whether, but how—we should approach death.
Hoping to find answers, we might go to religion or philosophy. We might go to art, such
as music or movies or paintings. Your English teacher has invited you to step into poetry. Your
English teacher cannot promise that any of the poems he selected will provide you with specific
answers to all of your own questions. Some of these poems might offer some answers, but even
if they just help you to feel some fellowship with other people who have sought answers to the
big questions about life and death, that alone can be worthwhile.
Your assignment is to write an essay, double-spaced in black ink with standard one-inch
margins and size-twelve Times New Roman font, following these instructions:
Please write an essay that you consider to be complete, in which you explore your
thoughts and/or feelings about death—or if you prefer a different word, mortality. You
will determine the number of paragraphs this essay needs, and by extension how many pages, but
please include discussion of four or more of the eighteen poems from this poetry unit in
your essay. What do these different poems make you think about, or how do they make you feel
with regard to mortality, particularly now in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic? You might
write specifically about how your chosen poems use various literary elements to achieve their
effects, and if you do, you can certainly incorporate some of the observations that you made for
your homework assignment about these poems. When you refer to any of the four (or more)
poems, of course you will identify the poem by its title and author
Please carefully choose four or more poems (from the eighteen in the unit) to weave into your written discussion of mortality
.
use 4 of the 18 poems (attached on the next page) as sources