The Book of the Dead Man (The Numbers) by Marvin Bell
1. The first part of the poem, called About the Dead Man and the Numbers gives the impression that the poem will be about the logistics of death, rather than the emotional, philosophical side. The first two lines of the poem, "The dead man makes space for himself the way a soccer player moves to the place to be next," links the dead man to the game of soccer, and the next three lines are explaining the flow of a game. How the dead man anticipates the future and is sometimes significant and sometimes irrelevant, and always a step ahead of the current action. Bell then goes on to say that the dead man, or his death, "stroke the embers of a failing thought" and inspire philosophical pondering of life and death. The poet who is doing the questioning asks, and the next six lines of the poem seem to almost be a response from the dead man. They all express a sense of abstraction, "a resonance to wrap one's mind around" except for the very last line which says that "It's what you do facing the guns" which is a mater of fact answer to the question "what it is to live as if one were already dead." It is also the first time where "you" is used this opens a direct line of communication with the reader.
2. In Part two entitled More about the Dead Man and Numbers the very first line draws the reader in with a "we". The next few lines explore the disconnected nature between the dead man and his body and time. It describes his "way of making the ephemeral last," creating long scenes on small moments while all the living in the world are struggling to get a first row seat. This is perhaps a comment on the inevitability of death. The importance of death is further emphisized in the line, "The preacher offering a future world, the historian waxing nostalgic, and the dead man underwriting them is what it takes." Here Bell shows how it is death that motivates the living and questions what it is like to be the dead man "among shifting loyalties?". He concludes that it means living in the remnants of the present, accepting that you are going to die, and "finding space for when it will matter".
This poem is effective because of the parallel structure it creates between the first and second part and the evolution of the poem over the course of these sections from broad and categorical to personal and individual.
I admire your ambition in taking this on--I find it pretty rough going myself. I like the way you move through the poem line by line, part by part, trying to create/find some sense of linear progression. I do wish you had done a bit more of what you do at the end, where you try to draw some larger conclusions about how the poem works--I would have liked to hear you say more about this movement from broad to personal and about what you see as the parallel movements of the two sections. That being said, good work.
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