Paper #3

“A State of Ardent Life”

            The poems Barbie Doll by Marge Piercy, In Time of Plague by Thom Gunn, and the song Ad A Dglgmut by Between the Buried and Me all have a similar theme:  something that can be considered beautiful by one person can be viewed as ugly or wrong by another person.  In Barbie Doll, the speaker refers to a girl/woman who changes her appearance in order to stop others from mocking her and in In Time of Plague, the speaker has sexual desires for two men at a gay bar, but cannot decide if he wants to sacrifice his reputation by acting on these desires.  In Ad A Dglgmut, the speaker is defending heavy metal music from people who cannot take it seriously because they claim it is just noise.

            Marge Piercy’s Barbie Doll describes a small girl in the first few stanzas as an innocent, typical child.  “The girlchild was born as usual and presented dolls that did pee-pee and miniature GE stoves and irons and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy” (Piercy 1-4).  The little girl is happy; she plays with toys and has not a care in the world.  However, when the girl reaches the age of puberty, “a classmate said: You have a great big nose and fat legs” (Piercy 6).  This changes the girl’s attitude from content and care-free to self-conscious and insecure about her looks.  Later on, Piercy describes her as “healthy, tested intelligent, possessed strong arms and back, abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity” (Piercy 7-9).  She says this to show that the girl has inner beauty still, even though her classmates do not care for her physical appearance.  However, she says after this that “her good nature wore out like a fan belt.  So she cut off her nose and her legs and offered them up” (Piercy 17-18).  Piercy is saying here that the girl, who is now a woman, decided to get plastic surgery because she was tired of being considered ugly by others.  The last stanza serves to prove the main theme of the poem:

                        “In the casket displayed on satin she lay

                        with the undertaker’s cosmetics painted on,

                        a turned-up putty nose,

                        dressed in a pink and white nightie.

                        Doesn’t she look pretty? everyone said.

                        Consummation at last.

                        To every woman a happy ending.”

                        (Piercy 19-25).

Piercy is saying here that the woman may as well have died because she altered her appearance and personality so much in order to be accepted.  Then, she ironically adds the last line, “To every woman a happy ending” to say that women think that plastic surgery makes them happy, but it really just changes who they truly are.

            In the poem, In Time of Plague by Thom Gunn, the speaker is conflicted; he cannot decide whether or not he should act on his desires to have sexual relations with two men in a gay bar.  He says, “I love their daring, their looks, their jargon, and what they have in mind.  Their mind is the mind of death” (Gunn 12-14).  He is comparing acting on his desires to death because he fears the judgment of others, since homosexuality is not very widely accepted in 1992, the year the poem was published.  “I seek to enter their minds:  am I a fool … or are they the fools, their alert faces mere death’s heads lighted glamorously?”  (Gunn 22-28).  He cannot decide if his desires are foolish or if the two men are foolish for being so accepting of their decision.  The speaker says, “I am confused … to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation” (Gunn 3-5).  This further proves the point that the speaker feels that acting on his homosexual desires equates to social suicide.

            Ad A Dglgmut by Between the Buried and Me is a song that uses various literary and musical elements in order to defend heavy metal music from people who judge it too harshly.  In the first 60 seconds of the song, the vocalist screams random nonsense instead of actual words in order to represent how music in this genre sounds to most people that do not enjoy it.  All they hear is just screaming and cannot make words out of it.  Later on, when there are actually lyrics in the song, the speaker says, “Scream loud, loud, loud, loud.  Static intoxication, sing this lovely violin song.  Beat this bottle on a wall.  Scream, scream, scream” (Rogers 5-8).  Thomas Giles Rogers, the main lyricist for the band, uses repetition of the words “loud” and “scream” to refer to the fact that many heavy metal bands only focus on the heaviness and brutal sound of their music instead of meaningful lyrics and musicality.  The speaker says later on, “It all makes sense... we're capable of beauty through sounds that make one cringe.  The dogs only hear us now” (Rogers 11-13).  He is saying here that some people find beauty in heavy-sounding music, especially if the artists switch between a very heavy sound and a lighter, more peaceful sound.  The song up to this point is extremely heavy and Rogers screams all of the vocals, but the tone of the music transitions into a slow, light sound during this quote.  This further proves the theme that it is possible for music to be considered beautiful even if most people find it offensive to the ears because of its heavy sound.  The phrase, “the dogs only hear us now” refers to the fact that only the die-hard fans would even hear the soft part of this song, since most people would be turned away by the tone of the rest of the song.  He also says after that, “The first time, tears came to my eyes while I was listening.  Noise brings so many things... makes my tingling skin freeze” (Rogers 14-15).  The speaker is saying here that the first time he heard music transition between two extremely different tones, it brought tears to his eyes and made him shiver.  He uses this to further prove his point by saying that he finds this kind of music so appealing, that it literally causes his body to react to it physically.

            The poems Barbie Doll by Marge Piercy, In Time of Plague by Thom Gunn, and the song Ad A Dglgmut by Between the Buried and Me all have a similar theme:  something that can be considered beautiful by one person can be viewed as ugly or wrong by another person.  Piercy uses the story of a little girl’s transition into a woman to prove this point and Gunn describes a situation in which a man cannot decide whether or not to act out his sexual fantasies.  Finally, Rogers uses tone, repetition, and onomatopoeia in order to defend the genre of music his band is classified as.