Ellen McWhorter: On "Dirge"
Kenneth Fearing's "Dirge" tells a story of a male protagonist whose "boring rhythms and habits, not of factory work, but of white-collar drudgery" (Barnard) nonetheless fail to provide safety from the explicitly tangible and ideological effects of the (and "a") Depression. Unlike previous critics, I read the poem as rendering an extremely problematic representation of the protagonist's death: either he dies ordinarily (from old-age, or perhaps from ill health), as others suggest, or he dies by suicide.