Muriel Rukeyser's the Book of the Dead by Tim Dayton

Author:Tim Dayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826263148
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

This is the gentleman from Montana.

—I’m a child, I’m leaning from a bedroom window,

clipping the rose that climbs upon the wall,

the tea roses, and the red roses,

one for a wound, another for disease,

remembrance for strikers. I was five, going on six,

my father on strike at the Anaconda mine;

they broke the Socialist mayor we had in Butte,

the sheriff (friendly), found their judge. Strike-broke.

Shot father. He died : wounds and his disease.

My father had silicosis. (98)

O’Connell preserves the memory of, and acts as far as possible to redeem the life of, his father in his actions as a representative, thus joining the mother in “Absalom” as one who struggles against death and injustice. Both cases, that of the son and that of the mother, may be seen as examples of one way in which human being “changes . . . it does not die,” as Rukeyser concludes “The Dam,” the poem that precedes “The Disease: After-Effects.” Rukeyser portrays both the son and the mother as taking up something of the life force of those they love and perpetuating it, so that this force is translated, shifts phases, but does not end.

After this follow three straightforwardly documentary stanzas, largely drawn from testimony. The facts set forward here give rise to the reflections of the next three stanzas, in which O’Connell looks outward from the death of his father to the struggle of the Asturian miners in Spain. These related struggles generate the energy that seeks an outlet in action to protect workers against contracting silicosis:

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