"The Death of A Soldier" by Wallace Stevens
...nge renews nature, helps it grow and flourish . It is a cycle that is repeated continually year after year. It is ironic that Stevens’s chose to represent the death a soldier with autumn. Autumn represents the end of nature as it prepares to renew itself during the winter season. Death here is not final; in fact, it is the opposite. Death of autumn is just a temporary separation in preparation for what is to come in the future. Human life is not so fortunate. Life for humans are long lived until its “contract” becomes null and void. When this contract ends, as seen in the poem, “death is expected” it is final, there is no coming back; the soldier “falls” just like a leaf falling from a tree yet his death was not imposing and is not pompous. “Death is absolute and without memorial”, the soldier dies on a field alone and there is a possibility that there will not be a memorial that there will not be a proper burial for this soldier. “As in a season of autumn, when the wind stops”, when the soldier heart stops contracting when his lungs can’t contract air any longer, when his “wind stops” he’s gone forever; never to return to this earthly plain, never to s...