Bloodsucking Bat 'And' Club Footed Ghoul's Poetry

Throughout human history, we have been fascinated with our own mortality. This obsession with life and death has carried over into our literary works, and given birth to stories such as Dr. Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dr. Faustus. These tales revolve around the preservation and unnatural extension of life, either through the power of science or the supernatural. On these ideas there are three pertinent examples of poems in which life is shown as being frail. In all of these poems life is presented as being weak and easily susceptible to negative outside forces. However, they each express this in a distinct manner; either through clinging to the life of a loved one, showing life’s weakness through its corruption and demonstrating …show more content…
These grotesque descriptions could refer to the negative elements of the natural world, as later in the poem it makes the prenatal being’s need for the “pure” aspects of nature apparent. If this is so, its wish to be protected from the harsher points of the environment coincides with natural instincts, as the human race has strived for its own protection since the beginning. But, in the next verse it speaks of how the search of complete protection of individual lives against nature, the human race may construct societies that crush individual freedoms. The being seems to be wishing to be able to have complete sanctuary without its liberty becoming stifled. This utopia is unfeasible because a balance must be struck between the two positive factors, since if a life were to be shielded from all danger its freedom and options would be greatly diminished. The being disregards this, and demands a paradox for itself.
This paradox is used to express to the reader a feeling of hopelessness; this realization that they are stuck in this corrupt world leads the being to its final conclusion, that death is better than a corrupted …show more content…
It infers no matter the innocence or purity of new life, it will be forced into evil. The being pleads for forgiveness for sins it has not committed yet, this demonstrates its inevitability. At the end of the verse, it asks to be forgiven for “my life when they murder by means of my hands,” and “my death when they live me.” The first part asks pardon for its life that has become corrupted by the thoughts of the corrupt. It decides that its life would become a tool for subversion and that it no longer would have control. The second part elaborates on the thought of life becoming null once the original purity is lost, and goes so far to say that when the innocence is lost that you are already dead. This gives a desperate, uncompromising tone to the poem and compels a sense of pity from the reader.

Expanding on the idea of inevitable corruption it uses a metaphor similar to Shakespeare's “all the world's a stage” from his play, As You Like It. But unlike Shakespeare's rather theatrical monologue deriving from the idea of the seven ages of man, this uses the metaphor to express a feeling