The Mission: Get A Five

Kevin Young’s poem “The Mission” juxtaposes life and death through the usage of structure, time imagery, and metaphor. From the beginning of the poem, its structure stands out to the reader. Young employs enjambment and caesura constantly to evoke life’s idleness. On the other hand, the usage of time imagery and juxtaposition under the same purpose, lead Young’s poem to be a conceit between nature and time.

The poem’s structure, being in couplets with constant pauses and enjambment, reveals some of the poem’s meaning. For example, “out of habit, evening /coming on, again - / the home’s clock, broke like a bone, always /read three.” In this case, the caesura breaks the couplet between the juxtaposition between day and night, and the time imagery used by the reader. This correlation between juxtaposition and imagery is mainly due to the poem’s structure. Young’s usage of enjambment represents life’s inconsistency. Also, the contrasting effects of caesura and enjambment reveal the contrast between life and death. The pause in this case, symbolizes death. On the other hand, the ending of the poem in caesura creates and effect of aposiopesis, as the phrases syntax “I could not see to see–” evokes life’s eternal repetition. Also, the alliteration of the “s” sound reflects the speaker’s disdainful tone towards the conceit of nature and time.

On the other hand, the poem employs time and nature imagery to juxtapose life and death. The depiction of the “children play[ing] tag / out front, while the bodies / snuck in the back” not only demonstrates death’s insignificance, but the inability of the living to overcome death. The mission mentioned in the title might signify the acceptance of death and living eternally, “soul after soul.” Immediately after mentioning it, the speaker describes the sun as the resemblance of the mission. This juxtaposition of time and nature proves that life comes and goes with the sun, and that it’s a repeating process of night and day. Hence, taking into account that the poem is structured into couplets, the reader might infer that it represents the day and night, and the eternal time ellipsis it creates.

This metaphor of time is seen as Young mentions the “mornings or dead / of night.” Here, the author describes the day and night as life and death. Then, the presence of enjambment extends the metaphor into making the reader infer that the night expands to the next day, therefore, the soul lives “soul after soul.” As a result, the juxtaposition of time and nature imagery creates a metaphor of life and death through the poem’s particular structure. Finally, as he mentions that “your eyes / adjust, become / like the night,” Young reveals that human beings never accept death, but instead, their perception “adjusts” to it, which in this case means that they die. Therefore, by juxtaposing dissimilar aspects like time and nature, Young creates a conceit of life and death, enhancing the meaning transmitted in his poem: the banality of living live and death.