Nora Hopper Chesson’s “A Dead Girl To Her Lover” belongs to that haunting borderland where lyric love-poetry, Irish folk belief, and the Gothic imagination meet. It speaks in the voice of a drowned young woman who calls from beneath the sea to the lover she has left behind. Yet the poem is far more than a conventional lament for interrupted romance. Its dead speaker remains passionately conscious: she hears winds, senses tides, remembers songs and footsteps, observes the erasure of her tracks on the shore, and finally sends her voice outward toward the beloved’s boat. Death has not extinguished desire. Indeed, Chesson’s unsettling achievement is to make longing seem intensified by death, released from the ordinary constraints of body, distance, propriety, and time. The poem moves with the beauty of a song, but its beauty is inseparable from danger. The speaker’s final invitation to her lover is tender, intimate, and potentially fatal.

Chesson wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, when English-language poetry was deeply interested in death, haunting, folklore, and the survival of older regional cultures within modern life. Born Nora Hopper in 1871 and associated through family background, imaginative allegiance, and literary subject matter with Ireland, she became one of the many writers drawn to the cultural energies of the Irish Revival. Her work frequently turns toward Irish place-names, folk idioms, legendary creatures, and the distinctive atmosphere often called the Celtic Twilight: a literary mode in which landscape appears alive with memory and in which the visible world seems permeable to supernatural presences. Chesson’s early death in 1906 gives her poetry an inevitably poignant biographical aura, though the force of this poem does not depend upon treating it as personal confession. Its speaker is a crafted dramatic voice, shaped by ballad tradition and mythic imagination rather than simply by authorial autobiography.

The poem’s setting on or near Achill, the island off the west coast of County Mayo, is especially meaningful. Achill had become a powerful imaginative location in Irish cultural writing: remote, sea-bound, exposed to Atlantic weather, and associated in popular consciousness with an older Gaelic life. Its cliffs, sands, waves, and changing light made it an ideal site for writers seeking what modern industrial life seemed to threaten or displace: elemental nature, local memory, and contact with legend. When the speaker says that “Achill sands” have not preserved the fading trace of her footsteps, the phrase does more than establish scenery. It registers disappearance in a culturally resonant landscape. The shore is a place where a human being may leave a mark, but the tide inevitably takes it away. The dead girl’s lost track becomes an image of mortality, of vanished embodied presence, and perhaps of the fragility of human memory itself.

The opening begins not with sight but with hearing: “I hear the hill-winds.” This choice immediately complicates the speaker’s condition. Though drowned, buried under water, and cut off from the living world, she remains acutely receptive. Sound crosses boundaries that bodies cannot. The hill-winds call through “long gray twilights and white morns,” carrying news of a world still governed by daily recurrence. Twilight and morning indicate time’s passage, but they are perceived from a realm in which time no longer promises change or renewal. The living world moves through evening into dawn; the speaker remains fixed beneath the sea. Chesson thus establishes a central contrast between cyclical natural time and the arrested time of death. The tides rise and fall, the winds come and go, the beloved’s boat travels onward, while the drowned woman cannot return.

The sea is the poem’s most commanding symbol because it is never only one thing. It is a grave, a barrier, a source of beauty, a medium of communication, and an emblem of the vast impersonal natural order. “Over my head the waves are brawling”: the verb gives the waves an almost quarrelsome violence. These are not gentle waters that cradle the dead; they are loud, active, and indifferent. The sea separates the speaker from her lover with physical finality. Yet it also connects her to the coast, the wind, the tides, and the boat upon which he travels. The same water that destroys the human body carries the rhythms of the world she still loves. This doubleness makes the poem more complex than a simple elegy. Nature is not presented as a consoling refuge. It is magnificent and musically alive, but it is also the power that has obliterated the speaker’s path and holds her beyond recovery.

Chesson’s diction darkens and beautifies death through a palette of gray, white, dark, pale, green, and blue. The “long gray twilights” and “white morns” give the upper world an almost spectral brightness, while the dead girl’s own “dark head” is covered by “dark water.” Such repetitions are not merely decorative. They create a submerged visual logic in which color conveys both atmosphere and emotional distance. The speaker’s underwater bed is made of “pale sea-wrack,” a phrase that transforms washed-up marine vegetation into the bedding of a drowned bride or sleeping maiden. The adjective “pale” conventionally suggests death, but it also makes the sea-floor scene strangely delicate. Chesson’s art lies in allowing the grave to appear lovely without ceasing to be terrible. The poem does not sentimentalize drowning; rather, it discovers a melancholy lyricism in the imagery through which drowning is imagined.

The speaker’s language gives the poem the intimate quality of an address overheard across an impossible distance. She repeatedly asks questions: “how will I answer or come to you?”; “where’s the charm that shall bid it back?”; “is the day of our meeting near?” These questions are not requests for information. They dramatize helplessness. A “charm” might, in folktale, command the waters to withdraw or reverse enchantment, but none appears. The question therefore invokes magic only to emphasize its absence. The dead girl lives in a world full of marvels—merrows sing, strange fishes hover, winds may perhaps bear a voice—but no supernatural intervention arrives to restore her to ordinary life. Folklore here does not offer easy rescue. Its beings and possibilities deepen the sense that the speaker has crossed into a realm governed by unfamiliar laws.

The “merrows” are especially important to the poem’s cultural texture. In Irish folklore, the merrow is a sea-being, often imagined as a mermaid or merman, associated with enchantment, seduction, and the dangerous allure of the ocean. Chesson does not develop an elaborate narrative about these creatures; their brief appearance is more effective than a longer explanation would be. “Wild merrows sing, and strange fishes hover / Above my bed.” The underwater world possesses its own music and spectators, but neither grants companionship. The merrows’ song is “wild,” not comforting, and the fishes hover above the speaker in a way that may suggest watchfulness, indifference, or a reversal of ordinary human perspective. The drowned girl has become an object beneath their gaze. The scene recalls the fairy lore of Ireland while also participating in a broader nineteenth-century fascination with beautiful, fatal women of the water: sirens, mermaids, drowned maidens, and seductive spirits who draw men toward ruin.

That broader tradition invites comparison with the ballads and supernatural lyrics that shaped Victorian and late-Romantic poetry. Poems of fatal love often feature a woman whose death leaves her as ghost, revenant, or enchantress, and whose continued attachment to a lover becomes dangerous. Chesson adapts that tradition with remarkable economy. Her speaker is not simply a passive victim of death; she has agency of a disquieting kind. She speaks, remembers, summons, and desires. Her final words imply that the sea-bed “might yet hold two.” The conditional phrase “might yet” introduces uncertainty, but not innocence. The speaker may be yearning for reunion in a spiritual sense, or she may be luring her living lover to drown beside her. The poem deliberately refuses to settle the question. Its emotional power arises from the fact that the invitation can sound like ultimate devotion and like a death-wish at the same moment.

This ambiguity is sharpened by the poem’s use of endearments in Irish. “Avourneen deelish” represents an Anglicized form of an Irish phrase meaning, approximately, “my faithful darling” or “my dear beloved.” “Mo bouchal” means “my boy,” while “Moirin” is an affectionate diminutive associated with Mary. These expressions make the address sound tender, local, and orally rooted. They are not exotic ornaments added to an otherwise generic romance; they establish the lovers’ shared linguistic world. The dead girl calls herself by the pet-name through which she wishes to be remembered, and she names her beloved through a language of intimacy that is at once personal and communal. For readers outside that linguistic tradition, the phrases also create a slight threshold of unfamiliarity, reminding us that the poem is speaking from a culturally particular coast rather than from an abstract landscape of mourning.

At the same time, the use of Irish-inflected language reflects a characteristic tension within Revival writing. English-language poets sought to evoke Gaelic speech, folklore, and feeling, sometimes preserving cultural memory and sometimes translating it into forms accessible to an Anglophone literary audience. Chesson’s poem does not claim to reproduce a Gaelic oral song. Instead, it creates a literary lyric haunted by the sound of Irish endearments. The effect is emotionally persuasive because the phrases appear precisely where the speaker’s loneliness becomes most direct. “Your Moirin’s lonely”: the simple statement follows the richer, stranger sounds of the terms of affection and makes them emotionally legible through context. The result is a poignant mixture of linguistic music and plain grief. Love survives in a name, but the named speaker is physically unreachable.

Repetition throughout the poem creates an atmosphere of persistence without progress. The speaker hears the winds at the beginning, and later the “hill-winds” are again “coming” and “going.” The tides rise and fall; the speaker dreams, wakes, and listens; the beloved’s footfall is desired but never heard. Such recurring movements imitate the natural processes of the shore while exposing their emotional cruelty. The sea continually changes, but it changes in patterns. The dead girl’s longing similarly returns to itself. She cannot arrive at fulfillment, and she cannot entirely relinquish hope. The repetition of “I hear,” “I listen,” and “I send” emphasizes that her remaining life, if that word may still be used for her condition, is concentrated in acts of perception and attempted communication. She has no bodily movement toward her lover. Her voice alone seeks passage.

Sound is therefore the poem’s deepest formal and emotional principle. The wind calls; the waves brawl; merrows sing; a lost song is remembered; a hoped-for footfall becomes the object of listening; and the dead girl sends her own voice “on their wings.” The poem imagines sound as less confined than the body. The voice may travel where the speaker cannot, perhaps entering the lover’s consciousness as an unexplained call from the sea. Yet sound is also poignantly insubstantial. It may be carried away, altered, unheard. The phrase “wanting a song that I used to hear” is particularly moving because it identifies memory as an ache of audition. The dead girl does not only miss her lover as an abstract person; she misses the ordinary acoustic life of love: songs, steps, familiar tones, perhaps the human voice that once made the world inhabitable.

The poem’s emotional trajectory shifts from recognition of separation to increasingly urgent appeal. At first, the speaker asks how she can answer or return. She acknowledges the waves overhead and declares that she will “never come back.” This is a stark acceptance of death’s finality. Yet the later sections complicate that declaration. She dreams of reunion, listens for the beloved, asks whether their meeting day is near, and finally calls to him directly as his boat moves offshore. The poem does not contradict itself so much as enact grief’s divided consciousness. The speaker knows that she cannot return to life, but desire refuses to obey knowledge. Bereavement, whether experienced by the dead in fantasy or by the living in reality, often produces precisely this tension between final fact and continuing attachment. Chesson turns that psychological truth into a supernatural drama.

The beloved is notably less individualized than the speaker. We know him chiefly through what she misses and imagines: his “footfall kind and dear,” his boat, his relation to the shore, and the names she gives him. This relative vagueness is artistically apt. The poem is not concerned with his biography; he functions as the distant locus of all the speaker’s desire for lost human nearness. His boat is both a realistic image of coastal life and a symbolic vessel. It is “blowing / Out where the green sea meets the blue,” an image that places him at a threshold between near water and open water, between the inhabited shore and the dangerous expanse. He is not yet dead; he is mobile, exposed, and potentially within reach of the sea’s claim. The speaker’s call may be a warning, a plea, a temptation, or all three.

The closing image of two bodies sharing the underwater bed should not be reduced to Gothic sensationalism. It brings together several of the poem’s central concerns: erotic union, burial, loneliness, and the fearful persistence of attachment. A bed conventionally signifies rest, marriage, sexual intimacy, and domestic shelter. Here it is a grave on the sea-floor. By imagining that it “might yet hold two,” the speaker transforms a symbol of love’s union into a figure of death’s enclosure. The effect is chilling because it forces readers to feel the emotional logic of the desire even while recoiling from its consequence. The dead girl wants not merely to be remembered; she wants the division between herself and her lover abolished. In the world Chesson creates, the only absolute union available may be the union of shared death.

There is also a philosophical dimension to the poem’s vision of love. It asks whether love’s endurance beyond death is necessarily consoling. Many elegiac traditions praise continuing attachment as proof that affection transcends mortality. Chesson offers a darker possibility: love that cannot end may become a form of captivity. The speaker’s fidelity is moving, but it binds her to the shore she cannot walk and to the lover she cannot touch. She has not entered peaceful oblivion or a serene heaven; she remains in a state of desire. The poem therefore questions sentimental assumptions about reunion after death. To survive as longing may be less a blessing than an ordeal. The sea, endlessly restless above her, becomes an apt emblem of this condition: desire has movement, noise, and force, but no final resting place.

Yet “A Dead Girl To Her Lover” remains beautiful because Chesson gives this ordeal such musical tenderness. Its natural images are vivid without becoming merely scenic, its folklore is suggestive rather than burdensome, and its supernatural premise reveals recognizably human emotions. Readers need not believe in merrows or in voices borne from the ocean to understand the sensation of listening for someone who will not come, or of feeling that a loved one’s absence has altered every familiar landscape. The poem’s achievement is to make private grief immense enough to inhabit winds, tides, islands, twilight, and open water. It recognizes that love may make the world luminous, but it also understands how love, when severed by death, can make that same world seem full of summonses from the unreachable. Chesson’s lyric remains memorable because it lets beauty and dread speak in the same voice, and because it knows that poetry is uniquely capable of making us hear that voice across the waters.

In the hushed chambers of American literature, few poems resonate with the quiet ferocity of Emily Dickinson's "I heard a Fly buzz — when I died." This masterful composition invites readers into the intimate theater of mortality, where the grand drama of life's final moments collides with an insistently ordinary intruder. Dickinson, that enigmatic recluse of Amherst, transforms the universal experience of dying into a scene of startling specificity, one that pulses with ambiguity and invites endless contemplation. Her verse does not merely describe death; it inhabits it, pulling us across the threshold with a precision that feels both surgical and spectral. To engage with this work is to rediscover poetry's profound capacity to illuminate the shadows of existence, stirring in us a blend of awe, unease, and profound empathy for the human condition.

To fully appreciate the poem's depths, one must first situate it within the rich tapestry of Dickinson's life and the cultural milieu that shaped her. Born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson lived during a period of intense ferment in American intellectual and spiritual life. The 19th century was an era marked by fervent religious revivalism, the lingering shadows of Puritan heritage, and the emergent currents of Transcendentalism and Romanticism. Yet Dickinson stood somewhat apart, her poetry forging a solitary path through these influences. Her reclusive existence—rarely venturing beyond her family home after her twenties—fostered an interior world of astonishing depth. Letters to friends and mentors reveal a mind preoccupied with mortality, eternity, and the fragile boundaries between the seen and the unseen. Family losses, including the deaths of close friends and the gradual decline of her own health, infused her work with an authenticity born of lived observation rather than abstract speculation.

This biographical intimacy dovetails with broader historical contexts. The mid-19th century in New England was a time when death was not abstracted but intimately woven into daily life. High infant mortality, epidemics, and the looming specter of the Civil War (which Dickinson witnessed through correspondence and local impacts) rendered mortality a constant companion. Victorian mourning rituals—elaborate funerals, keepsakes, and spiritualist inquiries into the afterlife—reflected a culture grappling with loss while clinging to promises of heavenly reward. Dickinson, raised in a Calvinist household, absorbed these traditions but subjected them to relentless scrutiny. Her poetry often subverts orthodox Christian eschatology, replacing assured resurrection with doubt, interruption, and the mundane. In this sense, the poem emerges not as pious affirmation but as a quiet rebellion, echoing the era's growing undercurrents of skepticism amid scientific and philosophical upheavals, including Darwinian ideas that challenged anthropocentric certainties. Dickinson's work thus captures a pivotal cultural shift: from communal rituals of dying to the solitary, existential confrontation with the void.

What elevates this particular poem is its masterful deployment of literary devices that render the abstract visceral. Dickinson's signature use of dashes creates a rhythmic hesitation, mimicking the faltering breath and fragmented perception of the dying speaker. These pauses interrupt the flow, much like the fly itself disrupts the solemnity, forcing the reader to linger in uncertainty. Capitalization, another hallmark of her style, elevates ordinary words—"Stillness," "Eyes," "King," "Fly"—to the status of proper nouns, imbuing them with mythic weight. The imagery is tactile and synesthetic: the "Blue — uncertain — stumbling Buzz" evokes not just sound but color and motion, a hazy iridescence that blurs the boundaries between life and decay. Metaphor abounds, with the room's stillness compared to the calm between storm heaves, suggesting death as a temporary lull rather than finality. Personification animates the fly as an active agent, "interposed" between the speaker and the light, while the "Windows" that fail suggest both literal sight and the soul's failing grasp on the material world.

Delving deeper into the poem's structure reveals a progression from collective anticipation to solitary dissolution. The opening establishes a scene of poised expectancy: the speaker, already narrating from beyond the moment of death, hears the fly amid a profound stillness. This paradoxical vantage—speaking from the grave—recalls other Dickinson explorations of posthumous consciousness, yet here it feels uniquely immediate. The "Eyes around" have exhausted their tears, breaths gather "firm" for the "last Onset," evoking a roomful of mourners braced for the divine arrival. The "King" introduces a layer of ambiguity: is this Death personified, or God, or some fusion of both? In Dickinson's universe, such figures often blend reverence with irony, underscoring the gap between expectation and reality. The speaker methodically "wills" keepsakes, signing away the "assignable" portions of self, a legalistic gesture that grounds the transcendent in the bureaucratic, highlighting the poem's fascination with the intersection of the eternal and the everyday.

Then comes the fly—the poem's subversive heart. Its "stumbling Buzz" interposes at the climax, deflating the anticipated epiphany. This creature, often associated with decay and the corpse in literary tradition, embodies the intrusion of the corporeal into the spiritual. Blue suggests both the ethereal and the bruised, uncertain stumbling conveys frailty rather than menace, yet its presence is profoundly disquieting. The final lines, with failing windows and the inability "to see to see," enact a double negation: vision collapses not just physically but epistemologically. We are left not with revelation but with occlusion, a masterful enactment of unknowing. Dickinson's enthusiasm for such precision in language mirrors her broader poetic project: capturing the ineffable through the concrete, celebrating the mind's ability to wrestle with what eludes it.

Thematically, the poem grapples with mortality's anticlimax, the fragility of human expectation, and the persistence of the material world. Death, so often romanticized in literature as a majestic transition, here arrives marred by banality. This resonates with existential philosophy; one might draw parallels to Kierkegaard's "sickness unto death" or Camus's absurd, where the search for meaning confronts the indifferent universe. The fly symbolizes not evil but irrelevance—the buzzing continuity of life indifferent to individual demise. It undercuts the mourners' solemnity and the speaker's preparations, suggesting that even in our most profound moments, the body and its decay assert primacy. Themes of isolation emerge powerfully: despite the surrounding eyes and breaths, the speaker's final experience is solitary, the fly a companion more immediate than any human or divine presence. This isolation echoes Dickinson's own life, her "circumference" of chosen seclusion amplifying the poem's emotional authenticity.

Comparatively, the work invites dialogue with Dickinson's larger oeuvre and contemporaries. In "Because I could not stop for Death," she personifies Death as a courteous suitor, offering a more measured journey toward eternity. Here, the tone shifts to abrupt interruption, revealing her versatility in probing the same mystery from divergent angles. Unlike Edgar Allan Poe's gothic extravagance, where death drips with macabre splendor, Dickinson opts for understatement, her fly a far cry from ravens or beating hearts. Walt Whitman's expansive embrace of death as democratic and regenerative contrasts sharply; Dickinson's vision is contracted, domestic, and skeptical. Philosophically, the poem aligns with Eastern traditions like Zen Buddhism, which emphasize mindfulness of the present moment—even the buzzing fly—as the path to insight, or with Stoic acceptance of impermanence. Yet it retains a distinctly Western tension, rooted in Judeo-Christian imagery repurposed for doubt.

The emotional impact of the poem is profound and multifaceted, evoking a shiver of recognition that lingers long after reading. There is horror in the fly's ordinariness, a subtle terror born not of monsters but of the realization that transcendence may dissolve into trivia. Yet alongside this unease flows a strange exhilaration—the thrill of witnessing consciousness persist just long enough to note the absurd. Readers often report a visceral tightening, a empathetic constriction of breath, as the poem mirrors the body's final labors. Its accessibility lies in this universality: who among us has not contemplated that last moment, wondering if it will bring light or mere buzzing darkness? Dickinson's genius transforms potential despair into artful wonder, affirming poetry's role as both mirror and lamp, illuminating our fears while kindling resilience. The emotional resonance deepens with rereading; initial shock yields to appreciation for the craft, the way syntax and imagery conspire to make the intangible felt in the bones.

Expanding on cultural resonances, one sees how the poem anticipates modernist sensibilities. Its fragmentation and rejection of grand narrative prefigure T.S. Eliot's wasteland voices or Virginia Woolf's interior monologues, where consciousness fractures under pressure. In a 19th-century context dominated by sentimental deathbed scenes in popular fiction, Dickinson's restraint feels revolutionary, a feminist assertion of intellectual autonomy amid patriarchal expectations of pious femininity. Her dashes, those "trembling" marks, embody emotional restraint laced with intensity, refusing the tidy closure society demanded of women and poets alike. This cultural defiance enhances the work's enduring appeal, speaking to generations navigating their own crises of faith and meaning.

Philosophically, the poem probes the limits of knowledge. The speaker's retrospective narration raises epistemological questions: can we truly "know" death from within? The failing sight—"I could not see to see"—encapsulates the paradox of attempting to perceive perception's end. This aligns with Kantian distinctions between phenomenon and noumenon, the knowable world versus the unknowable beyond. Or consider Heidegger's "being-toward-death," where authentic existence requires confronting mortality; Dickinson dramatizes this confrontation with unflinching honesty. The fly, in its stumbling vitality, reminds us of life's stubborn persistence, a Nietzschean affirmation amid apparent nihilism. Such layers invite readers to engage not passively but actively, their own experiences enriching the text.

Dickinson's enthusiasm for the natural world infuses even this deathly scene with life. Flies, after all, are pollinators and scavengers, integral to cycles of renewal. By centering one, she celebrates observation as a sacred act, poetry as a means to redeem the overlooked. This reverence for detail—for the blue buzz interrupting eternity—exemplifies her transcendental leanings, tempered by Puritan skepticism. The result is a poem that feels alive, breathing with tension and possibility.

As we immerse ourselves in this masterpiece, its emotional power swells. It comforts by naming the unnameable, discomfits by refusing easy solace. In classrooms and quiet readings alike, it sparks discussions that bridge centuries, reminding us of poetry's timeless gift: the ability to make strangers across time feel less alone in their wonderings. Dickinson did not seek fame; her stitched fascicles suggest a private communion with language and truth. Yet in sharing this vision, she offers us companionship in mortality's room—the stillness, the eyes, the king deferred, the fly eternal.

Further reflection on literary devices uncovers additional riches. Alliteration and assonance—the soft sibilance in "Stillness in the Room," the buzzing repetition—create auditory textures that echo the fly's presence. Irony permeates: the grand "Onset" yields to a pest. Juxtaposition heightens this, sacred keepsakes against stumbling insect. The poem's economy, its refusal of excess, mirrors the body's ebbing resources, each word weighted like a final breath. Such techniques are not ornamental but essential, forging an emotional architecture that supports the themes without overwhelming them.

Culturally, the work dialogues with visual arts of the period—memento mori paintings featuring flies or skulls, symbols of vanitas. Dickinson, an avid reader and amateur botanist, drew from scientific observation, her fly rendered with almost entomological accuracy. This fusion of art and science underscores her modernity, a bridge between Romantic intuition and empirical gaze. Biographically, her eye troubles in later life may inform the "windows failed," adding poignant personal resonance without reducing the universal.

The poem's impact extends to contemporary readers facing medicalized death, where technology prolongs the body while complicating the spirit's passage. In an age of pandemics and existential anxiety, its quiet honesty feels prophetic. It encourages not morbidity but mindfulness, urging us to value the buzzing present. Poetry like this does not merely describe; it awakens, stirring empathy and intellectual joy. We emerge from its room changed, more attuned to life's interruptions, more grateful for the light before it dims.

In exploring inheritance and legacy, the speaker's signing away of "assignable" portions critiques materialism, suggesting the self exceeds possessions. This philosophical detachment resonates with Buddhist notions of non-attachment or Platonic ideals of the soul. Comparatively, it echoes John Donne's holy sonnets, with their bold addresses to death, yet Dickinson's voice is quieter, more subversive. Her enthusiasm for paradox—death as both onset and interruption—fuels the poem's vitality.

Ultimately, "I heard a Fly buzz — when I died" stands as a pinnacle of lyrical achievement, its emotional resonance undimmed by time. It invites us to embrace uncertainty, to find beauty in the stumble, and to marvel at the human capacity for witness even at the brink. Dickinson's legacy endures because she captured not just death but the luminous strangeness of being, transforming personal vision into shared inheritance. In a world hungry for meaning, this poem offers not answers but the profound pleasure of the question, buzzing eternally in the reader's mind. Its power lies in this openness, this invitation to feel deeply, think critically, and emerge with renewed wonder for the fragile, buzzing miracle of existence. Through such works, poetry reaffirms its essential role: to comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable, and above all, to sing the soul's complex song.