Textual Analysis - Essay Example

The first of these texts which will be analyzed is that of Dorothea Lasky’s “Black Life”. This particular poem, though brief, expounds a very nuanced and full-bodied meaning of just what seeming meaninglessness greets the newborn child upon entering life. Says Lasky, “You are born and it is to a black life/Full of abuse and strange things…You die and it is from a black life/That you die from/You leave this one and go into the next/Where nothingness surrounds and evaporates/With the ease of something/That has done this sort of thing before” (Lasky 1).

By detailing the somewhat meaningless yet methodical pressures that move all humanity through its brief experience on earth, the author is able to detail some sense and methodology to what has otherwise been labeled as a form of madness and ultimate depression with regards to the transient nature of life and its ultimate meaning. Although such a definition is no more comforting than any other definition of life and the ultimate depression it espouses, the author goes on to define some rationality to the way in which this “black life” leaves the earth with little to no fanfare or care on the part of those around it.

Says Lasky, “I leave and I am black life/I leave you cause you didn’t need me after all/And I want to/Be what you made me to be/But you never really made me/This life made me/This thing that I am” (Lasky 1). In admitting that the world is perhaps better off without this blight of a depressed human being, the author is able to underscore the meaninglessness that life entails as the world cares not whether this depressed person is gone. Moreover, the ultimate cause of the depression is related not to be something biological, not something that has been recognized due to the singular unfairness of life; rather, it is born out of the fact that they “never really