Death of a Young Son by Drowning

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Grief in the Poem “Death of a Young Son by Drowning.”
The poem “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” written by Margret Atwood embodies a narrative literary work that talks about the demise of a young son and how the mother feels. The speaker in the poem is the mother of the deceased son. With the loss of the son and the mother providing the details of the death, the audience is presented with a unique point view on the loss of a loved one. The narration as given by the mother shows that she feels guilty for the loss. Nonetheless, the relator endeavors to make the reader sympathize with her situation through the use of metaphors and imagery.
The use of metaphor aids the reader to connect directly with the accident and the mother’s grief. In the opening of the poem, the writer stunningly employs a metaphor for the birth of the son that consequently introduces the reader to the drowning incident. The first stanza poem goes “He, who navigated with success/the dangerous river of his birth/once more set forth/on a voyage of discovery/into the land I floated on/but could not touch to claim” (Atwood, Stanza 1). In this excerpt, the writer implies that the son overcame the risks associated with being born and set forth to discover his life only for his aspirations not to materialize.
Besides the use of metaphor, the narrator’s use of imagery to pass the message of grief to the reader. In stanza eight, the Atwood writes “It was spring, the sun kept shining, the new grass/ leaped to solidity; /my hands glistened with details” (Atwood, Stanza 8).

Here the narrator focuses on detailing the inevitable cycle of life. The new grass represents a human being that has already been born while the sun represents the life’s misfortunes and challenges that can take away the life of a person. Besides the above-implied meaning, the stanza also has a deep sense in that the mother has to contend with the loss of her son as evidenced with the glistened with details which means that she has remained with memories of her deceased son.
In conclusion, the reader of the poem through the use of literary devices such as imagery and metaphor shares in the grief of the mother. The metaphor is used to show the dangerous journey of birth and the premature death of the son. Imagery is aptly applied to explain the cycle of life.

Works Cited
Atwood, Margret. “Death of A Young Son by Drowning | Poetry in Voice.” Poetryinvoice.Com, 2018, https://www.poetryinvoice.com/poems/death-young-son-drowning. Accessed 11 Oct 2018.