ShmoopTube

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Here's your shmoop du jour, brought to you by Rest and Sleep. Two of our three favorite

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things to do while lying down.

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This form of address is most commonly referred to as a... what?

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And here are the potential answers...

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Okay, so this poem is clearly addressing... someone.

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It's not like the speaker is talking to himself. Although... with all this talk of Death, it's

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likely he doesn't have many friends...

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But this question wants to know what form of address this poem is written in.

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So... it's mainly a vocab question. Let's see if we can narrow things down by eliminating

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some of the decoys...

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D is probably the easiest choice to cut, because dialogue implies that two or more people are conversing...

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...and in this case, we only have one morbid gentleman communicating all by his lonesome.

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Asides are uber-short statements, not 14-liners... and they are reserved more for plays than for poems...

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...so it's not an aside either.

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It can't be an apostrophe, because that's a punctuation mark, not a...

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...hold on a second.

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What if -- bear with us for a sec here -- the word "apostrophe" has a... second meaning?

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In fact... it does. Which is a fact you would only know if you had studied your poetry terminology.

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So... hopefully you have.

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In poetry, "apostrophe" can also refer to lines that are being delivered to an abstract

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thing, rather than to an actual person or living audience.

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Which... is precisely what we have here.

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The author is speaking to Death -- probably because he's such a good listener.

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It's not a soliloquy, because it's not a long speech directed at the audience...

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...and monologue doesn't work, because it's not a speech delivered in a play to another character.

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So yeah -- believe it or not, B -- apostrophe -- is the correct answer.

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Tell all your friends...

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