Poet's Choice

He hardly drinks a pint of wine;

And that, I doubt, is no good sign.

His stomach, too, begins to fail;

Last year we thought him strong and hale;

But now he's quite another thing;

I wish he may hold out till spring."

They hug themselves, and reason thus:

"It is not yet so bad with us."

The friends here are not scoundrels. Swift is interested in their psychology, the human quirks that can make us vain about our predictions or take pleasure in sounding authoritative about the decay of our friends. The poem is delightful partly because it encourages a fresh look at ourselves.

In his absorbing new book, Mark Strand also uses the notion of his own death as a springboard. Like Swift's lines, but in a distinctly different way, Strand's poem includes laughter and sorrow not as mere opposites, but as one feeling:

2002

I am not thinking of Death, but Death is thinking of me.