The Rites for Cousin Vit
The Rites for Cousin Vit - meaning Summary
Defiant Life Beyond Death
A speaker narrates a funeral moment where the deceased refuses to be contained by a casket. Rather than quiet rest, the woman is imagined as energetic and irrepressible, returning to bars, lovers, talk, movement and unpredictable emotion. The poem emphasizes vitality, bodily presence and the tension between death’s formality and a life that resists being reduced to silence or decorum. It leaves her simultaneously absent and vividly present in memory or spirit.
Read Complete AnalysesCarried her unprotesting out the door. Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can’t hold her, That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her, The lid’s contrition nor the bolts before. Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise, She rises in the sunshine. There she goes, Back to the bars she knew and the repose In love-rooms and the things in people’s eyes. Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge. Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss, Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.
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