This is an explication of the depressing poem "A Moment's Stay," transcribed below.
While the Italian epigraph of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” hints that Prufrock’s unresolved indecisiveness is a universal characteristic of man, choices can only be made through initial indecision. In “A Moment’s Stay,” Vishesh Jain paints a relationship plagued by infidelity as the speaker lies by his love’s deathbed, unsure of whether to feel vengeful glee or heartbroken grief. Through the narrator’s interaction with farewell and depiction of his love, Jain crystallizes the uncertainty of the speaker’s slowly deteriorating relationship and ultimately contrasts this indecision with the determination of death.
Although the use of farewell initially seems clear from the first line of the poem, its complex personification and characterization reveals the uncertainty and hesitation in the speaker’s mind. The use of the capitalized “Farewell, Farewell, Farewell” combined with the metonymy of the “scythe” with death immediately evoke the image of the grim reaper. However, rather than sending people to their afterlife, the speaker’s first statement is a plea to “free me from this hell,” and this paradoxical portrait of death is solidified when the speaker goes so far as to beg death to be compassionate “like an angel.” The notion of asking a grim reaper figure to be “an angel” is almost ridiculous, but Jain’s utilization of the paradox in conjunction with the request to “Take me from hell!” mirrors the unnatural chaos in the speaker’s heart. While these conflicting images illustrate the speaker’s indecision, his hesitation is demonstrated by the repetition of “stay your scythe” from moments to years, prolonging the climactic decision until the end of the poem. The speaker’s complex interactions with farewell and death thus illustrate the magnitude of his love’s uncertainty.
Similarly, the opposing perspectives on his relationship and his lover throughout the first four stanzas suggest the speaker’s uncertainty and their bond’s deterioration. Jain utilizes a simile within a simile to elaborate upon the thinning ties between the lovers: “I remain anchored like a vessel to its mooring/Though it be shredded/As thin as a lonely thread of silk.” While at first their love is shown to be as strong as a “mooring” anchoring a ship to shore, the second simile causes this link to be “shredded” to a mere “thread” of connection. Furthermore, the diction of “lonely” reminds the reader that silk threads are not meant to be alone in nature or civilization, whether in a spider’s sturdy web or in a lady’s beautiful garment. The slow death of a flower whose “petals fall/From years into decades” mirrors this powerful emphasis on the devastating extent of their love’s deterioration. Just as he juxtaposes two opposing perspectives of death, Jain contrasts the “soft” image of innocence and the peacefully alliterative “soft smile of sweet sleep” with suggestive “red lips/Of sin, of Prynne, of Karenin.” The metaphor comparing hair to white lamb’s wool alludes to the purity of Jesus while the following allusions call forth the adulteresses Hester Prynne and Anna Karenina, rendering a stark contrast that epitomizes the speaker’s conflict between love and hate.
At last, Jain concludes his poem with the resolution of indecision, augmented by a shift in style and sound that parallels the speaker’s determination. In contrast to the anaphora of “And the soft” in the earlier stanza which contributes to the sense of hesitation, the final stanza instead repeats “Farewell” to the hell of cuckoldry in which he is entrapped. This foreshadows the speaker’s suicide, as he asks death to “stay your scythe” one last time, not to prolong his lover’s life but to end his own: “another stalk of wheat/Ready for your dread harvest.” This metaphor comparing himself to a “stalk of wheat” not only implies that he is only one man in a field of lost souls but also suggests the inevitability of death and the meaninglessness of life, as wheat and grain are grown only in order to be cut down. As all conflicting thoughts of indecision disappear, the final stanza thus echoes the speaker’s loss of hope and determination of death.
As Jain himself once stated, “Let happiness be good and sadness be bad. Then when choosing between good and bad, choose well.” While Eliot’s Prufrock remains mired in a swamp of indecision, this poem’s speaker resolves his indecision with an irrational choice of emotion that ends his life along with his wife. Although both poems expound upon the human plight of uncertainty, neither offers a solution; perhaps the answer surprisingly lies not in the feelings of the heart but in the reason of the mind: choose well.
