A Sunny Mourning

In Kevin Young’s “The Mission”, he contrasts light and dark imagery to portray the dichotomy of life and death. By employing elements of satire, he gives the comparison an ironic tone. The poem’s purpose is to find grim humor in the eternal cycle of life, grievance, and death. The fact that humor is present in a poem with death as a topic is ironic in itself.

Contrasting imagery first appears when Young writes “of cars, lights low / as talk, idling dark”. The other instance where this is seen is when he complains of how “The sun / is too bright. / Your eyes / adjust, become / like the night. Hands / covering the face— / its numbers dark / & unmoving”.

By saying, “Mornings or dead / of night”, he plays with the wording, and the expression “dead of night”. This is an ironic description, for the poem concerns death. Furthermore, the word “morning” is a homophone to the word ‘mourning’, which would be considered a pun if its spelling were different. Peoples’ existence, thus, is either spent mourning, or in a grave.

The statement, “He kept everything / but alive”, exemplifies a type of humor that manipulates the words ‘he kept everything’. On one hand, it can mean that the father maintained control over his belongings. Alternately, the second line establishes the humor by posing a secondary definition for the phrase, as “he kept himself everything but alive”, meaning that the deceased one fervently, yet pointlessly kept his health. This poses another irony, which satirizes the effort to preserve the body and avoid an unavoidable death.

Such satiric humor wishes to criticize a society of monotonous and continuous sorrow, for “I have come to know / sorrow’s / not noun / but verb”. We must learn, according to the poem, to regard death more lightly.