‘No more myself but a colander’: Dimensions of death and vitality in Alice Oswald’s Falling Awake

Grand International School, Qingdao, 266000 Hefei Road No. 688, China

^* Corresponding author: hailanxia@grandqd.com

Abstract

Winner of multiple prestigious awards, contemporary English poet Alice Oswald is considered one of the leading voices in modern poetry. In her seventh poetry collection, Falling Awake, Oswald has crafted a poetic image of death that diverges from the traditional conceptions of death as morbid and a source of anxiety. This article examines Oswald’s depiction of death in Falling Awake within the framework of German-American philosophy academic Peter Koestenbaum’s theory of the two dimensions of death. In her exploration of the physical and metaphysical dimensions of death, the ‘death of another’ and the ‘death of myself’, Oswald actively investigates their roles as agents of erosion and their relationship with life and vitality. This essay analyses a selection of poems from Falling Awake in accordance with Koestenbaum’s dimensions of death, arguing that in her illustration of death, Oswald conceptualises it as a reminder to sustain life and vitality, and as a process in the cycle of life that fosters the disintegration and diversification of the individual, thereby enabling the emergence of new life forms and the enhancement of the vitality of the macrocosm.