New Poetry Response (Computation)

Ingrid Hernandez
February 22, 2007
The Computation by John Dome
Personal Response

S: A man
O: Losing the love of his life
A: The woman he loves
P: To show that he has not forgotten her, and cannot live without her.
S: His long lost love
Tone: Melancholic

In this poem the speaker talks about his life without his loved one. He suggests that without her his life has become long and burdensome; it is as if he was living, but was dead inside. It is interesting to note that in the first eight lines the author does not, technically, end the sentence, but lets it run on and on by using commas and semi-colons. This seems to directly parallel to the stretched burdensome life he describes after losing his loved one. His tears drowned him for one hundred years, for forty he has lived without of memories, and for a thousand he did not think nor do anything. But it is not that he is literally living forever, simply that ever since she’s been gone, his life seems so worthless that his days have become long and lonesome. In the last two lines the author really hits home his message when the speaker says, “Yet call not this long life; but think that I Am, by being dead, immortal; can ghost die?” Here the speaker wonders how he can possibly die when internally he is but a ghost. Also, the final sentence is shorter and comes to end with a question mark, just as his soul has been deteriorating with the excruciating pain her absence brought to him. Whether is losing a partner, a friend, a parent, the pain and the emptiness they leave in the lives of those who loved them cannot never cured. You remember them, you hear their voices, you see them in your thoughts, and you too start to die inside because they are no longer here. Your desperation is such that the thought of living without that one whom you loved and lived for is simply unbearable. Though I cannot say that I have lost anyone or anything that would have killed me internally, it is what I fear the most. I cannot imagine ever living without my parents, my sisters, my friends for then my life too would seem to go on for thousands of years even when my soul has died.