Dry tears 6

From Opel: Immersion Set for Distant Shores
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What about looking for references in other works? In classic literature, stark images like carcasses, corpses, skeletons and bones would not be considered repugnant. There's a Baudelaire poem entitled "A Carcass" whose subject is the body of a beloved woman, although the Symbolist poet intentionally evokes disgusting images on the theme of death, with lines like "The flies the putrid belly buzz'd about".

We can find a sentence that goes "The peasants swarmed down like flies to a carcass", in a chapter titled "How Hereward was wrecked upon the Flanders Shore" from the 1863 adventure novel Hereward, The Last of the English, by Charles Kingsley. But we can find stark images also from the previously quoted Shakespearean character Feste, who usually "festively" sings lines like "With hey, ho, the wind and the rain" perhaps in the way Syd sings "Heigh ho!" in "Octopus" but, rather unexpectedly for us, he also sings a melancholy song with these stark lines:

My poor corpse, when my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O where
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there!

— William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night


So, perhaps it's better to limit the references that we are looking for, only to the works quoted so far. After all, there are more than a few...



sources →
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. 1602. Play. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/twelfth_night/full.html