Death in Coleridge’s “The King is Dead, Long Live the King” Essay

Introduction

The short story “The king is dead, long live the king” by Mary Coleridge portrays the dying of the king and the behavior of the court and his retinue. The death of the king certainly brings sorrow, but it also brings the grieving at the most profound level of self-awareness. This sensation is to be indulged and savored, for readers are never more alive than when they are forced to contemplate our deepest potential for feeling, regardless of the cause.

Thesis This story is centered on the theme of death which helps the author to unveil attitudes towards death and the reaction of the court towards the king’s death.

The theme of death

The theme of death helps Coleridge to unveil true relations between the king and his court and portray their feelings towards the king’s death. “The very favor Amyas has hitherto enjoyed will stand in his way at the new court. I only hope he may be in time to make his peace” (Coleridge 479). For many people, the memory of loss triggers pain and suffering. Coleridge portrays that the court has lobed the king and feels great sympathy for him. “I respected him. For all he was a king, he treated me like a gentleman” (Coleridge 482). Coleridge depicts that for most people, the concept of grief as a vehicle for making them feel more alive may appear contradictory and maybe even a little perverse (Abrams 154).

The uniqueness of this story is that death is portrayed as a new stage of existence. It is possible to assume that a soul of the king ‘walks’ around the palace and sees the events and grief experienced by his fellow men. “All at once a sense of loneliness that cannot be described rushed over him, and his heart sank” (Coleridge 482). Coleridge gives special attention to the feelings and sufferings of the queen. Her feelings are rooted in pain and grief.

These emotions trigger the human imagination and feed it as much as they threaten to warp it. There is certainly a sense of strangeness in this work, but perhaps Coleridge’s truest intention here was to represent the ultimate void of death. In crossing from one world to another, a landscape that was once comprehensible and rational is transformed into something vaguely mystifying and mysterious. The reader is attracted to this monstrous manifestation of a craving for the shadow of death and its desolation. The reader enters the mind of the king only to find himself trapped in the stifling atmosphere of the outer world from which there is neither escape nor modulation.

Readers come to appreciate this atmosphere of a deathless condition for the king, its “totality of effect” is contrarily weakened (Enscoe and Gleckner 88). As the most important, the theme of death helps Coleridge to unveil one of the queen’s secrets hidden from everyone else. When a secret door opens, “She put her finger to her lips, as though to counsel silence, and then threw herself into his arms” (Coleridge 483). Coleridge does not tell directly about this man, but it is evident that the queens love and admires him.

Summary

In sum, the theme of death helps the author to unveil many secrets and feelings of people, their values, and attitudes towards the king. The plot revolves around the description of events and feelings and serves as a mirror of real-life events and morals. Only death helps the king to know the truth and real feelings of his court. Since everything that occurs is filtered through a first-person narrator, the reader is left in the uncomfortable position of trying to figure out how much of what this narrator reveals is truthful.

References

1. Abrams M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.
2. Coleridge, M. “The king is dead, long live the king” in Selected English short stories. London, New York, 2006, pp. 476-483.
3. Enscoe E. Gerald, Gleckner, Robert F. Romanticism: Points of View. Prentice Hall, 1962.