Lemmy's Castle

Publication Instance Details #3196

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes

Details

Human Rights Issues	Health HR & Weapons of Mass Destruction (incl. nuclear)
Irish Context	Housing, health, education (Ireland)
Languages	English
Genre	Part Of Lyric Sequence
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	The poem forms part of a sequence of poems written about the death of the poet's mother. Sexton employs the world of video games and Super Mario interspersed with fragments of private memories between past and present. The collection is written in two parts. Lemmy's Castle portrays the world of a hospital where patients are treated for terminal illnesses. The speaker compares it to a huge boiler plant, a greenhouse, and a volcano. With a powerful concluding line, the poem uses the imagery of the famous painting titled 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus' (c.1560) by the leading painter of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Evoking notions of empathy and tragedy and derived from Ovid, the painting inspired W. H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux-Arts", named after the museum in Brussels which holds the work of art. It is also the subject of a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams. Bruegel's 'Landscape With the Fall of Icarus', Super Mario World and the hospital collectively explore how diverse types of fatal leaps (illness, natural catastrophe) go almost unnoticed by passersby questioning our lack of empathy for the suffering of others.