The theme of Death in Victorian and Modernist Literature: a comparison between the poetry of Emily Brontë and D.H. Lawrence

In poetry, fiction, and drama, death is considered as a central theme commonly used to elicit an emotional response in the reader or audience. Death often refers to the end of life and is frequently related to a loss and to emotional reactions such as mourning and sadness. In the Victorian age, death has been often the interest of writers and poets with a particular emphasis on the emotional aspects while in Modernism the depiction of death is less sentimental and more concrete and factual. This paper is a discussion of the differences between the representation of death in Victorian and Modernist poetry in relation to two poems that deal with death: A Death-Scene[1] by Emily Brontë and A Woman and Her Dead Husband[2] by D.H. Lawrence. The language adopted by the authors, the structure and rhyming arrangement of the poems, the contrasting use of imagery and figures of speech as well as the different approach to the representation of death are widely discusse