Essay

Students completed the following essay in class today:

(Suggested time - 40 minutes)
The following two poems present views on euthanasia. Read the poems carefully. Then write an essay in which you compare and contrast the two poems, analyzing how each poet uses literary devices to make his point.

*Euthanasia-the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals (as persons or domestic animals) in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy.


To the Mercy Killers

If ever mercy move you murder me,

I pray you, kindly killers, let me live.

Never conspire with death to set me free,

but let me know such life as pain can give..

Even though I be a clot, an aching clench,

a stub, a stump, a butt, a scab, a knob,

a screaming pain, a putrefying stench,

still let me live, so long as life shall throb.

Even though I turn such traitor to myself

as beg to die, do not accomplice me.

Even though I seem no human, mute shelf

of glucose, bottled blood, machinery

to swell the lung and pump the heart–even so,

do not put out my life. Let me still glow.

Dudley Randall (b. 1914)



HOW ANNANDALE WENT OUT
"They called it Annandale--and I was there
To flourish, to find words, and to attend:
Liar, physician, hypocrite, and friend,
I watched him; and the sight was not so fair
As one or two that I have seen elsewhere:
An apparatus not for me to mend--
A wreck, with hell between him and the end,
Remained of Annandale; and I was there.

"I knew the ruin as I knew the man;
So put the two together, if you can,
Remembering the worst you know of me.
Now view yourself as I was, on the spot--
With a slight kind of engine. Do you see?
Like this. . . You wouldn't hang me? I thought not."
--E. A. Robinson