Bury Me In My Shades - Analysis

A deathbed scene that is also a performance

The poem’s central claim is that this hipster identity is held together by props, and even its final wish is less about being remembered than about being seen a certain way. The dying man lies in a pad with no heat on Sullivan Street, an address that immediately places him in a recognizable bohemian map. But the detail that truly defines him is that he is Wearin’ his shades so nobody can tell whether or not he was cryin’. The sunglasses are not just style; they are a shield against emotional exposure. Even at the edge of death, he curates the image of himself as cool, unreadable, and therefore untouchable.

The crowd around the bed: a community built on pose and need

Silverstein frames the bedside gathering with a comic roll call: junkies and loners and coffee shop owners. It sounds like a neighborhood scene, but it’s also a catalogue of people who orbit a lifestyle. The dying man takes one last puff of imported stuff, and that phrase matters: even his exit is branded. The tone here is wry and slightly affectionate, but it’s also setting up a contradiction—this is supposed to be an intimate moment, yet it’s crowded with spectators and with the apparatus of a subculture.

His will: generous gestures that can’t hide the emptiness

The deathbed instructions mix real tenderness with self-parody. He wants to Send my sandals home to Mom, the one request that reaches outside the scene and hints at a simpler relationship. But most of the list is about symbolic disposal: Hang my T-shirt away, and especially Burn my guitar because I never learned how to play. That confession is the poem’s quiet knife: he possessed the emblem of artistic authenticity without the work behind it. He even performs charity—Give my pad / To some needy lad—while casually saying Keep my cash and my stash. The tension is that he wants to be remembered as both generous and effortlessly cool, yet his life is shown as a set of costumes and conveniences.

The refrain: sunglasses as a final mask

When he repeats Bury me in my shades, the line becomes a chant, like the chorus of a folk song that pretends to be sincere while winking at its own melodrama. The shades stand for the identity he refuses to take off: if people can’t see his eyes, they can’t read him, pity him, or claim to know him. That desire is poignant and ridiculous at once. He asks for a grave ’neath the coffeeshop and a sad folksong, turning death into one more neighborhood set-piece—an event with the correct soundtrack and audience.

The hinge: what the living actually do

The poem’s sharpest turn comes when the narrator switches from the dying man’s requests to the group’s actions: We threw his sandals out, We sold his guitar, We smoked all his stash, and threw all his poems away. The tone darkens here; the comedy becomes a kind of bleak inventory of small betrayals. Even the one tender gesture toward Mom is dismissed. The community that gathered around his bed is revealed as opportunistic, or at least casually indifferent, and the dead man’s cultivated myth is dismantled in a few plain verbs—threw, sold, smoked, spent.

The inheritance that survives: a joke with teeth

The final irony is that, after they squander everything else, the speaker says, I got the poor beatnik shades. The shades are the one object that remains sacred—not because of love, but because they are the purest symbol. In a poem full of art-signifiers (the guitar, the poems, the folksong), the only thing preserved is the accessory that hides feeling. Silverstein makes that ending sting: the group honors the performance, not the person. And the refrain returns one last time as if the dead man’s voice has been reduced to a catchphrase—proof that, in this world, image outlives intimacy.