Written a year ago by myself and my good friend Elleirabird, from the Antishurtugal livejournal group, this series takes an in-depth and only mostly serious look at the various poems, songs and scraps of doggerel that Paolini managed to smuggle into the Inheritance Cycle.

E: It took me a few minutes of re- reading this to realize why I hate this poem so much: there’s no flow at all, and everything is unconnected. You could literally take the lines here and turn it into prose and it would sound better. That might be true with other well-written poems, but I always thought that poetry wasn’t just about the words, but about the format of it, the way the poet breaks apart lines and phrases to give them a different kind of meaning. I’m going to admit here that I’m not an expert at analysing poetry; we just started really going in-depth in class and the focus is more on allusions and language, not things like metre and rhythm. So I’m not going to throw those terms around. I love writing poetry myself (mostly free verse) and I go by a more intuitive, instinctive approach with it, trying to figure out how words connect and how everything flows. That’s how I’m approaching this poem.

T: I’d like to approach this in my own unique way, by examining the technical aspects and techniques of poetry, including metre, rhythm, rhyme, and literary devices like metaphor and hyperbole (as well as by laughing at logical inconsistencies and terrible word-choice, like any good sporker). Metrically, and rhythmically the first stanza isn’t terrible, but still well short of publishable. It dithers between trochaic, iambic and spondaic, and either 3 or 4 feet. The rhythm does begin with a certain sing-songiness, but the third fifth, and sixth lines more or less destroy it. Even aside from the technical aspects, the techniques of poetry (meaning specific literary devices like metaphor, hyperbole, metonymy, etc), are for the most part absent. You might find some unoriginal micro-metaphors sprinkled here and there, but otherwise it’s just flat narration masquerading as poetry.

In the kingdom by the sea,
In the mountains mantled blue,
On frigid winter’s final day
Was born a man with but one task:
To kill the foe in Durza,
In the land of shadows.

T: Others have discussed the “mountains mantled blue” line, but any proper analysis should point out that it doesn’t make sense. It’s not descriptive enough, it doesn’t create atmosphere, and it says next to nothing about the setting of the scene being described.

E: One of the main problems I have with this poem is the fact that Paolini was obviously trying to make it into an ‘epic’ poem in the vein of stuff like Gilgamesh and Homer’s work. I am neither an avid reader nor a knowledgeable source on epic poetry, but even I know that this fails as being an epic poem. From five minutes of research I found out that epic poetry follows a set of rules (most poetry except for free verse does) and epic poetry isn’t an exception. Apparently it has to do stuff like open in medias res, and usage of epithets. I KNOW THIS AFTER FIVE MINUTES OF RESEARCH, PAOLINI.

Nurtured by the kind and wise
Under oaks as old as time,
He ran with deer and wrestled bears,

E: Wrestled bears? Really? Have you seen a bear in real life? Unless if you’re freaking He-Man, they will kill you with a single blow.

And from his elders learned the skills,
To kill the foe in Durza,
In the land of shadows.

E: This is probably the stanza that I hate the most. There’s so much clichéd in there: the ‘oaks as old as time’ and the mentioning of elders who are ‘kind and wise.’ Meter-wise, it’s not that bad. It’s bad, but I can read it out loud and it sounds okay. But just okay! Poetry’s supposed to be about using language to tell something new. This doesn’t tell me anything at all. So this guy’s trained. Great.

T: These are the unoriginal micro-metaphors I mentioned. (For the record ‘micro-metaphors’ are the kind that only show up for maybe two lines and are never mentioned again. They can often be used really well, but Paolini just screws it up). Aside from the forehead-smashingly hackneyed personification of death, these are the only kind of metaphor that Paolini deigns to employ. Technically, this stanza is much the same as the first, inconsistent and nondescriptive. Poetry of this sort should be vivid, intense and compellingly descriptive.

E: And it’s not. This is old and tired and completely uninspired.

Taught to spy the thief in black
When he grabs the weak and strong;
To block his blows and fight the fiend
With rag and rock and plant and bone;
And kill the foe in Durza,
In the land of shadows.

E: No, this is the stanza I hate the most. This is where I realised that Paolini didn’t care about the words going into the poem; he just wants to fit stuff in, no matter how painful it is for me. I mean, what the hell? The first two lines barely make any sense, the second two lines border on nonsensical jabber for me. “With rag and rock and plant and bone?” Is he fighting Durza with magical shrubs and dishcloths? Also, I don’t like the way he keeps repeating the last two lines. That can work in some poems (T.S. Eliot, etc.) but here it just appears to be tedious. Don’t repeat it if you don’t have anything to say, Paolini.

T: I’m sorry; did I mention his personification of Death was jaw-droppingly stupid? I did? Good. It’s easy to see that “the thief in black” is meant to be Death, but it is possible to use a less-hackneyed phrase for it? Or rather, is it possible to use a more-hackneyed phrase? I quail at the thought.

Quick as thought, the years did turn,
‘Til the man had come of age,
His body burned with fevered rage,
While youth’s impatience seared his veins.

T: snerk Everybody knows what puberty is, Paolini. Stop.

E: On a less snarky level, I want to mention that this stanza is awfully jarring when put in context with the rest of the thing. There’s little to no rhyme in the previous lines, but here the last three lines all rhyme. Not to mention that it’s littered with taku’ dubbed ‘micro-metaphors’ and they’re all just shockingly bad. ‘Quick as thought’ is particularly mind-boggling.

Then he met a maiden fair,
Who was tall and strong and wise,

T: yawn. The saying “show, don’t tell” is thrown around a lot in the fiction-writing community, but it applies more to poetry than any other written form. If you want your poetry to be memorable, don’t just say “she was fair”, tell us why. Describe the graceful slope of her nose, the majestic sweep of her hair, the subtle tinge of colour on her cheeks.

E: Or, if you’re Paolini, the way she smells.

T: Besides, if you’re trying to win your girl over by writing poetry, I’m sure you can call her better than ‘fair’.

Her brow adorned with Geda’s Light,
Which shone upon her trailing gown.

T: Whose light? “Adorned”?

E: Here’s a note to all you writers out there: don’t reference your own mythology if you’ve never mentioned it before. Is Geda’s Light something really important to elves? I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it. All meaning is lost on me.

In her eyes of midnight blue,

T: I believe several people have pointed that, short of contact lenses, “midnight blue” is not a natural colour for eyes. Of any animal. There again, we are dealing with elves, and a particular Angsty Badass Princess Mary Sue Elf in particular, so who knows.

In those enigmatic pools,

E: And here we are. One of the most infamous lines Paolini’s ever written.

T: Well, it’s sort of what I’m talking about, adding a bit of description. And yet, this describes nothing. Description only works if one can imagine the scene/image being described. What does an “enigmatic pool” look like?

Appeared to him a future bright,
Together, where they would not have
To fear the foe in Durza,
In the land of shadows.

E: What? What? This is the funniest stanza because it’s so random. “Woah, suddenly I met this hot girl so screw the prophecy/telling of the elders. (Sounds like a certain book we all know and love – maybe it’s foreshadowing.) And it’s kind of odd, because this guy doesn’t want to fear this guy, so instead of taking care of the very odd problem he just goes off and marries the girl. You didn’t expect that to stay that way, did you?

T: What I don’t understand is why he presumes the maiden would agree or want to spend the rest of their days together. He only just met her and looked into her eyes, and suddenly they’re destined soul mates (and she doesn’t have a say in the matter). Also, the scansion here is terrible. Paolini obviously doesn’t understand the point of a caesura or when to use one. The only time I would break in the middle of a lexical phrase like that is for the sake of rhyme, and even then it’d better be a damn good one.

So Eragon told of how the man voyaged to the land of Durza, where he found and fought the foe, despite the cold terror within his heart. Yet though at last he triumphed, the man withheld the fatal blow, for now that he had defeated his enemy, he did not fear the doom of mortals.

E: “Yes, I defeated a maniac, bring it, Death.” This doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s kind of a mind screw – guy born and trained to kill this ‘foe’ (whoever it is, and I’m beginning to wonder if the ‘foe’ even did anything to warrant this in the first place – or if it’s Death, as Taku said) but then decides to not kill him and doesn’t think about the possible repercussions of that act. But it doesn’t matter, because he’s not afraid anymore.

T: Wait… He was that close to defeating his enemy, and then he just WALKED AWAY? Wasn’t killing his foe, like, the ONLY reason for his existence?

He did not need to kill the foe in Durza. Then the man sheathed his sword and returned home and wed his love on summer’s eve. With her, he spent his many days content until his beard was long and white.

E: And his groin was smooth and hairless!

In the dark before the dawn,
In the room where slept the man,

E: LOL I USE WEIRD SYNTAX SO I SOUND ARCHAIC. No, Paolini. Switching around your tense does nothing but annoy your reader.

T: I’m more bothered by the fact we noticed it. In a poem of this sort, syntax should be almost invisible. In fact, in prose of any sort, sentence structure and word choice shouldn’t even register to the reader. As before, the only reason I would do this is for the sake of rhyme, and even then it’d better be important.

The foe, he crept and loomed above
His mighty rival now so weak.

E: Possibly the most awkward phrasing ever, innit?

T: Serves you right for letting your sworn enemy go free without so much as keeping track of him. Not that I’m advocating a lack of mercy (dragon rider), but really, a little common sense would help.

E: We were both wrong. The foe is Spider-man. He can hang onto ceilings!

T: Spiderman, Spiderman,
Does whatever a Death-metaphor can!
Can he loom from above?
Metaphorically, I s’pose he can
Look Oooout, he’s the Spiderman!

From his pillow did the man
Raise his head and gaze upon
The cold and empty face of Death,
The king of everlasting night.

T: Didn’t I warn you about the poo-flingingly, cave-paintingly, wheel-carvingly, fire-lightingly original and genre-redefining metaphor of personified Death? We’re talking about an entire non-English culture, thousands of years of mythological and cultural development, and they have the exact same metaphor for Death as Edwardian Britain? There are teenagers still dicking around on MySpace who have written more compelling lines of verse than this. “The king of everlasting night”? PLEASE.

E: Maybe it’s because I used to be that teenager on MySpace, but this didn’t seem…that…bad. The ‘cold and empty face of Death’ is actually an okay-ish line. I like the idea of Death being this faceless entity that looms over your bed at night. But yeah, he completely ruins it with the utter wrist-cuttingly awful subsequent line.

T: Okay, it’s a nice enough line in the right cultural context, but it’s more the fact that it has been done before. A million times. It’s just so utterly clichéd that I cannot find the words to express how utterly clichéd it is.

Calm acceptance filled the man’s
Aged heart; for long ago,
He’d lost all fear of Death’s embrace,
The last embrace a man will know.

E: Is it just me, or does ‘embrace’ mean something else in this context as well?

T: Again, terrible application of caesura. This stanza (like most of the others) really lacks any sense of flow or rhythm.

Gentle as a morning breeze,
Bent the foe and from the man
His glowing, pulsing spirit took,

E: At least it wasn’t a ‘throbbing’ spirit.

T: Haha! ‘Throbbing’. Kippurbird could write a meatfic based on this! I mean, really. An unknown assailant swoops in while the man is in bed, and forcibly ‘takes’ his ‘pulsing’ manhood. And then they run off together, because it’s obviously True Love. Edward would be inspired.

And thence in peace they went to dwell,

T: At least he used ‘thence’ right.

E: It’s pretty much the only part of the sentence that is right.

Forevermore in Durza,
In the land of shadows.

T: This is not a poem. It is a disaster. No, it’s a poetaster. That’s a real word, too.

E: This. Poem. Does. Not. MAKE . SENSE. I don’t understand the story – some guy was born to fight some other guy in Mordor? But apparently he decides to go for a girl instead and gets killed by the foe about sixty years later? And then he goes to heaven? In Mordor? It’s a very confusing poem, and I don’t think it’s my fault. Paolini is trying so hard to be epic and it just fails horribly. It’s a definite poetaster. The metre is off just enough to make it hard to read, the language is uninspired (yes, Death is cold and the king of darkness and all that) and it tells me absolutely nothing I haven’t read before. But what’s the message of this poem? Be a pussy and you’ll get killed eventually? Show mercy and it bites you in the ass? That seems pretty wrong to me. Was the foe Death? If so, how can you kill Death? WHY would you want to kill Death? It’s a natural part of life.

T: I agree that the underlying moral is just, well, there doesn’t seem to be one. This is just mundanity disguised as epic adventure. The story basically is, a man goes to school until he grows up, then he meets a girl, gets into a fight and lives the rest of his life peacefully until some burglar climbs through his window and goes stabbity.

E: This is an empty poem. Empty of originality, empty of substance, and empty, I’ll dare to say, of a soul. I think that really passionate writing has a spark all its own, and this just lacks that. Paolini just strings together pretty words and hopes that we don’t dig beneath them.

T: I think that’s entirely apt. Paolini included an epic poem in his books because Tolkien sprinkled songs and poems through his. Just like the novels, however, he’s jumped into it without even the most basic of research. In terms of the actual techniques of poetry, Paolini only makes use of some of them by accident, and then only sparingly or inconsistently. The use of metaphor is amateurish at best, and at worst it’s so clichéd that it’s bordering on universal plagiarism. There are barely any descriptive nouns or strong verbs, there’s no emotional investment for the audience, and the rhythm is dissonant and annoying.

For my final point, I’d like to mention the mode of creation. According to the book, Eragon wrote this poem in a single frenzied sitting of passionate artistic creation. I’ve read a lot of work created in this manner, and been involved in it a fair bit myself, and I can tell you this poem does not conform to the expectations of ‘passionate frenzy of writing’. This poem has a careful, studied feel to it, as though each word has been carefully chosen (which would actually make it worse, I think). It is languid to the point of monotone, clumsy and awkward, and has none of the energy or vibrancy of a truly inspired rush of words.

E: Agreed. I’ve written poems in one sitting that have been crazy and passionate and kind of awful in many ways. This is a very pedantic, droning piece of work. In fact, this poem is like a miniature version of Eragon: it was obviously written in one draft, with no real research done on how the craft works, and made partially in effort to echo the great writers of our time. The language is pretty at times but disgustingly overwrought as a whole, with empty descriptions and metaphors that we’ve seen a million times before. There’s no emotion.

T: And yet he continues to try. Stay tuned for the next instalment of Elleirabird and Takugifian Spork, in which we look in-depth at the dozen or so poems Paolini managed to smuggle into his three books (mostly Eldest). It’ll be epic.

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Comment

  1. LoneWolf on 8 May 2012, 12:03 said:

    Didn’t enjoy the spork, too nitpicky. The poem and its morality is fairly obvious, just badly written and hammy.

  2. Danielle on 8 May 2012, 13:58 said:

    Wrestled bears? Really? Have you seen a bear in real life? Unless if you’re freaking He-Man, they will kill you with a single blow.

    Maybe he meant a domesticated bear, the kind you only meet in fictional zoos? ‘Cause I’ve seen bears in the wild. They’re scary. Even somewhat domesticated ones are pretty intimidating. I fed apples to one in a zoo/rescue project (they take animals that used to be exotic pets or show animals and give them a home) and even though he was SUPER excited to be getting a snack, it was terrifying, how big those claws and teeth were. If he hadn’t been behind a fence and Plexiglas window, I’d be dead in a minute.

    Hmm….maybe Paolini meant a teddy bear? If so, that’s not quite so manly.

    Didn’t enjoy the spork, too nitpicky. The poem and its morality is fairly obvious, just badly written and hammy.

    I liked the spork. We all know PaoPao’s poem is terrible, but it was nice to see HOW terrible it is, technically speaking. Though I am surprised you didn’t mention how the only halfway decent line (“In the kingdom by the sea”) was taken directly from Poe.

  3. WulfRitter on 8 May 2012, 15:00 said:

    “In the kingdom by the sea” was taken directly from Poe.

    I saw that, too, and it immediately made me long for real, substantive poetry. I’m off to go and read some Poe now.

    Funny spork, by the way. Although, I’m not sure that Paolini’s poetry is that much worse than the other requisite poetry that’s shoehorned into virtually every fantasy novel. It’s gotten to the point that when I see verses in my prose, I just skip on over.

  4. Asahel on 8 May 2012, 15:36 said:

    bq.Wrestled bears? Really? Have you seen a bear in real life? Unless if you’re freaking He-Man, they will kill you with a single blow.

    Maybe he meant a domesticated bear, the kind you only meet in fictional zoos? ‘Cause I’ve seen bears in the wild. They’re scary. Even somewhat domesticated ones are pretty intimidating. I fed apples to one in a zoo/rescue project (they take animals that used to be exotic pets or show animals and give them a home) and even though he was SUPER excited to be getting a snack, it was terrifying, how big those claws and teeth were. If he hadn’t been behind a fence and Plexiglas window, I’d be dead in a minute.

    Hmm….maybe Paolini meant a teddy bear? If so, that’s not quite so manly.

    Reminds me of the 1949 boxing match between Gus Waldorf and a bear. Not kidding. They muzzled the bear so that it couldn’t bite him and put gloves over the claws so that it couldn’t claw him to death. And then, in a sport that the bear had never trained in and was completely unnatural to any of its instincts, it beat the trained boxer (and even that shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to people that understand exactly how strong a bear is).

    Never try to take on a bear with your bare hands. Always bear weapons to avoid a grizzly outcome. Thanks, and good night. I’m here all week. Tip your waitresses.

  5. LoneWolf on 8 May 2012, 15:54 said:

    I liked the spork. We all know PaoPao’s poem is terrible, but it was nice to see HOW terrible it is, technically speaking.

    It’s just that the moral was obvious. Banal and badly executed, but obvious. The act of not understanding it was more damaging to the spork, then to the sporkable poem.

  6. Fireshark on 8 May 2012, 17:52 said:

    Sorry, but much of this is not valid criticism, as the poem was supposed to be written in another language. I wouldn’t have included the translation at all, but we can’t knock an Ancient Language poem because it doesn’t have rhyme and meter in English. However, I think your points about originality and imagery are accurate, no matter what language the poem was in.

    So yeah, I think the real problem was that Pao put it in the book, because it’s thoroughly unenjoyable in English.

  7. Danielle on 8 May 2012, 18:04 said:

    Sorry, but much of this is not valid criticism, as the poem was supposed to be written in another language.

    Then by that token, is the dialogue between Paolini’s characters really purple prose, because it’s supposed to be translated from a made-up language?

    That aside, contrast Tolkien’s poetry. It’s supposed to be translated from Elvish, but in English it’s beautiful. It has rhythm and meter, and more than that, it makes you feel something. Tolkien didn’t use the “It’s another language” excuse when writing his Middle Earth poetry, and neither should Paolini.

    For a real-world example, try Japanese haiku. When translated (or, in some cases, transliterated) to English, it retains its meter and trademark syllable count (5-7-5). And it’s still beautiful.

    TL;DR: Paolini has no excuse for a poem that doesn’t flow well in English.

  8. Fireshark on 8 May 2012, 19:03 said:

    If you translate a poem and it’s still good, that’s because you changed a lot.

    For the record, I always took the main language of the Cycle as English, because of a few instances of actual rhyming and wordplay that only make sense in our language.

  9. Asahel on 8 May 2012, 20:28 said:

    It’s just that the moral was obvious. Banal and badly executed, but obvious. The act of not understanding it was more damaging to the spork, then to the sporkable poem.

    I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with this. The moral may seem obvious, but the execution isn’t just bad. It’s so bad that what appears to be the moral cannot possibly be the moral. And if that can’t be the moral, then what is the moral? Does it have one? The poem truly becomes unintelligible.

    Let me explain:

    The moral is that a man comes to terms with mortality and so does not fear Death when it comes, yes? Only that’s what’s revealed at the end; when we consider everything leading up to it, however, that conclusion makes no sense. The man was born with one task: to kill Death. That’s… odd at least. Let’s go on. The man is trained and learns skills with which to fight and kill Death. So… other people know skills that can be used against Death, and they impart them to this man. That’s also quite strange. Then he meets a beautiful woman and sees in her eyes a future where they don’t have to fear Death. Now, this is before the whole coming to terms with mortality thing, so why doesn’t he need to fear Death? Well, maybe it’s just bad foreshadowing because the man then goes, fights Death, triumphs, but withholds the fatal blow. Fatal blow. As in he could’ve killed Death and he didn’t do it. The only explanation as to why he doesn’t kill Death is because he already beat it, so he doesn’t need to kill him. No word on upsetting the natural order of life, just kind of a standard “I beat you so I don’t have to kill you” victory. He then lives a long, full life until Death kills him, but he’s not afraid because… he beat him once? Well, fat lot of good it did you since he got you that time.

    So, what do I conclude? Though it has a lot of imagery associated with Death, the foe cannot be Death. But, if it’s not Death, what is it and what is the moral? It must be some kind of powerful, evil spirit. So, the moral then would be “if you’re tasked with destroying evil, do not fail to kill it or in the end it will kill you.” But that doesn’t fit, either, because the man is at peace with being killed by the evil spirit.

    The poem is not understandable because it undermines the most obvious moral and doesn’t give us an adequate back-up moral.

  10. Oculus_Reparo on 8 May 2012, 22:08 said:

    Cue the intro to the “Beauty and the Beast” song, please!

    ‘Neath oaks old as time . . .
    Old as they can be . . .
    Some guy wrestled bears,
    But nobody cares
    For this poetry . . .

  11. Oculus_Reparo on 8 May 2012, 22:12 said:

    On a more serious note, I’m glad someone noticed the, um, nature of these poems. I think the criticisms are valid ones—confusing material, poorly told. I’m not sure it was a good choice to call a place “Durza,” when it is also the name of one of the villains. Is Durza a famous place—a name for the land of death, for instance, which it would make sense to name a villain after? We don’t know. We’re left to wonder for ourselves, and that’s the sort of thing it would be helpful to know.

  12. Taku on 8 May 2012, 22:29 said:

    Fireshark: I have addressed that point in the past, and concluded that it is not an excuse. There are many, many translated poems that retail their lyrical beauty in English without changing ‘a lot’ of the original tone and message. One of my favourite examples of this is an Aztec flower-song poem called “Is it you”? by Netzahualcoyotl.

    Zan te te yenelli
    aca zan tlahuaco
    in ipal nemoani
    In cuix nelli ciox amo nelli?
    Quen in conitohua
    in ma oc on nentlamati
    in toyollo…

    Is it you?, are you real?
    Some had talked nonsense
    oh, you, by whom everything lives,
    Is it real?, Is it not real?
    This is how they say it
    Do not have anguish,
    in our hearths…

    Despite it being originally written in a very different language to English, the translated version is both lyrically beautiful and faithful to the original. This is because certain poetic techniques are universal to poetry, no matter what language: metaphor, repetition, apostrophe, personification/anthropomorhism, hyberbole, and so on. These poetic devices translate across languages.

    Quite simply, as stated, Paolini’s ‘epic’ poem does not contain any of the poetic devices listed above. This is not a failure of translation, as it is clear that techniques like personification and hyperbole are not specific to a single language. It’s somewhat more fair to comment on our criticism of rhythm or rhyme, but a talented, fluent translator can overcome such problems, as in the translations of Caedmon’s Hymn, or Beowulf, or the Kalevala.

  13. LoneWolf on 9 May 2012, 03:48 said:

    He then lives a long, full life until Death kills him, but he’s not afraid because… he beat him once? Well, fat lot of good it did you since he got you that time.

    He’s not afraid because he supposedly came to terms with his mortality and realized that maybe Death isn’t that horrible as to kill it.

    I wonder, however, what these elders said when they learned that the man failed the task they give him. Epic of Gilgamesh it ain’t, true.

  14. Minoan Ferret on 9 May 2012, 04:44 said:

    At least Gilgamesh’s journey actually was, well, epic. It seems when people like Paopao set out to be epic, they just come across sounding silly.
    Translating poetry into English and conveying the same feelings, etc, isn’t an easy task, but it can still be done (again, I really like N.K. Sanders’ translation of Gilgamesh’s epic). I could never get Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura to translate as anything like the original’s feel, as full of complex images as it is.

  15. Asahel on 9 May 2012, 09:33 said:

    He’s not afraid because he supposedly came to terms with his mortality and realized that maybe Death isn’t that horrible as to kill it.

    Yes, now, what I’m saying is maybe if that were in the poem, the poem would be undertandable. If you have to add conjecture to make something understandable, then it is not understandable on its own merits.

  16. LoneWolf on 9 May 2012, 10:33 said:

    I found it understandable. Maybe I’ve read enough clichéd poetry to understand its assumptions. Like Yuri Andropov, the head of Soviet KGB, wrote (translated):

    We’re mortal in this frail, sublunar realm.
    Life’s like a blink; non-being lasts forever.
    Our planet goes around and around,
    And people live, and people die on it.

    But the Existence, born in deep, dark mist,
    Cannot be stopped on its way to dawn.
    And other generations on our Planet
    Continue the relay-race of life.

    After reading enough of verse like that, Pao is completely understandable.

  17. Asahel on 9 May 2012, 14:08 said:

    I found it understandable. Maybe I’ve read enough clichéd poetry to understand its assumptions.

    Perhaps you understand what it wants to be. Even that much I can see for myself. But I still contend that you can’t understand what the poem is. If you do understand it, then answer my questions.

    The poem is about a man coming to terms with his mortality and, thus, not fearing death, yes?

    Ok, so what was the deal with the man being born with the task to kill Death?

    Also, what kind of training could the elders have given him that would help him kill Death?

    Furthermore, how can one use rag, rock, plant, and bone to block the blows of Death and fight it?

    If you understand the poem, surely you can answer these questions in a way that is consistent with the rest of the poem.

  18. LoneWolf on 9 May 2012, 14:19 said:

    Ok, so what was the deal with the man being born with the task to kill Death?
    That makes his refusal to kill it all the more poignant.

    Furthermore, how can one use rag, rock, plant, and bone to block the blows of Death and fight it?
    Quite a lot of fairy tales and mythology has such trivialization of Death’s abilities. I remember an Ashkenazi Jewish tale about a holy rabbi who took hold of Angel of Death’s weapon and refused to return it. The Angel was powerless to do anything about it, and the Rabbi held his weapon ‘till God convinced him of death’s necessity. It’s no more odd then the concept of a personified Death in the first place.

  19. Asahel on 9 May 2012, 15:47 said:

    Ok, so what was the deal with the man being born with the task to kill Death? That makes his refusal to kill it all the more poignant.

    Does it now? Well, perhaps it would if we knew why in the world he was supposed to kill Death. Otherwise, it makes no sense that he would even be born with such a task.

    Furthermore, how can one use rag, rock, plant, and bone to block the blows of Death and fight it? Quite a lot of fairy tales and mythology has such trivialization of Death’s abilities. I remember an Ashkenazi Jewish tale about a holy rabbi who took hold of Angel of Death’s weapon and refused to return it. The Angel was powerless to do anything about it, and the Rabbi held his weapon ‘till God convinced him of death’s necessity. It’s no more odd then the concept of a personified Death in the first place.

    Now that’s actually understandable. Take away Death’s weapon and there is no more power in Death. That makes sense. Being trained in the art of Deathslaying, which apparently makes use of rag, rock, plant, and bone… That makes no sense.

    It’s because of these things that make no sense that I question if the poem is really supposed to be about Death in the first place. It seems like it should, but there’s too much that doesn’t add up.

  20. LoneWolf on 9 May 2012, 15:56 said:

    Well, perhaps it would if we knew why in the world he was supposed to kill Death.
    Well, death is bad!

    Being trained in the art of Deathslaying, which apparently makes use of rag, rock, plant, and bone… That makes no sense.
    Well, if Death is personified, that makes it something akin to Godslaying. Difficult, but not impossible.

  21. Minoan Ferret on 9 May 2012, 16:08 said:

    Given that Death can be incapacitated by a twisted ankle, it’s no surprise s/he can be thwarted by rag, rock, etc.

  22. Asahel on 9 May 2012, 17:44 said:

    Well, perhaps it would if we knew why in the world he was supposed to kill Death. Well, death is bad!

    And we start the circle all over again. So, if Death is bad, why did he not kill Death? Give me an answer from the poem itself. Oh wait, you can’t. The poem never bothers to even hint at why he leaves Death alive despite it being the goal he was born for, trained for, and risked his life for.

    Being trained in the art of Deathslaying, which apparently makes use of rag, rock, plant, and bone… That makes no sense. Well, if Death is personified, that makes it something akin to Godslaying. Difficult, but not impossible.

    Yes, and with a task so difficult, obviously someone would want to use the most powerful and fearsome weaponry at his disposal. For example, the dirty rag used to blow his nose! And don’t forget the intimidating shiny rock from the riverbed! Oh, oh, and the menacing plant! Tremble before its greenery! Last but not least, cower in front of his mighty bone. (Actually, that last one does fit much of Paolini’s other writing, so I’ll let it slide.)

  23. Taku on 9 May 2012, 23:13 said:

    Lonewolf, consider this: If the moral were so obvious, would we be having this argument? This poem simply isn’t consistent enough to hold to any moral reading.

  24. LoneWolf on 10 May 2012, 02:51 said:

    I consider it obvious, just badly done. Just like Eragon is obviously meant to be a hero, despite his behaviour being unheroic.

    So, if Death is bad, why did he not kill Death?
    Because Death in only outwardly bad, and True Tranquillity comes from accepting it, blahblahblah.