Sweetness By Stephen Dunn Analysis

Sweetness by Stephan Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it, for a while lost in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk to mouth-size, hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness that doesn’t leave a stain, no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....

Tonight a friend called to say his lover was killed in a car he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed to repeat, and
He also adds how those with mental disabilities can get away with things that “normal people cannot by acting sweet and innocent. The “sweetness” isn’t necessarily a specific tone but more of an attribute to encourage those who are depressed.

Dunn uses the line, “to make sense of what it means to be alive” to encourage the reader to really think into depth and how fortunate they really are. In the little time that we have on this Earth, we should all be caring for one another instead of judgmental and picky. The tone of “Sweetness” is caring because as the reader keeps scrolling along, they start to realize more and more how life can be taken away very quickly without any kind of warning. This is illustrated by the analogy of a car crash. The depressing tone in the middle of his poem is evident. “His voice was low and guttural, words we have such grief, until we were speaking only in tones”. Dunn does a good job with this because almost everyone can relate to this in one point of their lives. When something bad happens, one becomes affected in such a way that they don’t even want to take the time to talk about it so they avoid it at all costs. This is when people try to help out but that specific person just pretends to ignore them just like the loss of the mans loved one in