Dirge for a Joker
Dirge for a Joker - meaning Summary
Mirth and Mortality Collide
Plath’s short poem presents a speaker addressing someone whose compulsive, irreverent laughter undermined solemnity from birth to death. That laugh functioned as both mask and worldview, treating life as a “monumental sham” and infecting others with sardonic delight. The tone is elegiac but wry, closing with the image that death requires a final role reversal: the deceased must become the straight man to the worm’s grim joke.
Read Complete AnalysesAlways in the middle of a kiss Came the profane stimulus to cough; Always from teh pulpit during service Leaned the devil prompting you to laugh. Behind mock-ceremony of your grief Lurked the burlesque instinct of the ham; You never altered your amused belief That life was a mere monumental sham. From the comic accident of birth To the final grotesque joke of death Your malady of sacrilegious mirth Spread gay contagion with each clever breath. Now you must play the straight man for a term And tolerate the humor of the worm.
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