Thank you for ruining my evening with this poem
(;.
I would have to vote for "pessimistic" regarding this
poem.
In the first four stanzas, the poem describes
several ways of killing a man: crucifixion, lancing, gassing, and
bombing.
To me, the stanza about bombing is especially
frightening, because all it requires is the "pressing [of] one small switch." It is so
impersonal that there is no reason to believe that the bomber has any feelings of anger
or hatred toward you.
The last stanza, of course, seals the
pessimism:
These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a
man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see
that he is living
somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him
there.
This leaves us with
nowhere to escape to (except that we're now in the 21st century, which doesn't seem much
better than its predecessor). The poet is saying that the very conditions of life in
the twentieth century can (and do) kill people. Noise, pollution, overcrowding,
mechanization, mass political movements, rapid communications--all of these are
killers.
The poet could have mentioned some of the benefits
and conveniences of modern life, but he doesn't. That's because he is a pessimist, at
least in this poem.
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