"There is no light
East
of the Bridge’’
In the poem "The Librarian’’, the narrator describes the city where he grew up and the city where he lived together with his first wife for a couple of years. The city is presented in a negative light, a place filled with degradation, violence and vices. In that town, the narrator’s first wife cheated on him with another man and in the same city the narrator expressed different degrees of violence. To highlight just how bleak the city and dangerous it was, the narrator ends the description with the quote from above, implying that the city was so degraded that even the sun refused to shine on it.
"The hour of death
is the only trespass’’
In the poem mentioned above, the narrator analyzes time and how it is something that can’t be stopped. The idea that time rules everyone is a common motif in the poem and time and time again the narrator admits that every person is a slave to time. The first part of the poem ends with the quote from above, claiming that there is one exception, which is the hour of death. This hour is special because it is not governed by the normal flow of time. This thus transmits that somehow, times becomes distorted then and while many may think the last hour passes by too fast, other think of it as passing too slow.
"of going, and forever
coming back, returning
to the instants which were not lived’’
The major theme in the poem is centered around death and the reasons why someone who has died may have feel the need to come back and ‘’haunt’’ those who are still living. The first idea mentioned is linked with boredom and the narrator argues that the spirits come to haunt the living because they are bored in the afterlife. The other idea analyzed by the narrator concerns the regrets the dead have and the narrator argues that the dead feel the need to return to the land of the living because they can’t stop thinking about the opportunities they did not take. Thus, through this, the narrator urges his readers to not let themselves be ruled by fear and rather to do everything they can to achieve their dreams and make sure that at the end of their lives, they will have no regrets.
