Southey’s poem The Surgeon’s Warning centers on the surgeon’s
afterlife instructions, specifically the preservation of his physical body. The
Surgeon warns the parson and undertaker to protect his body from his prentices
and resurrection men, or body snatchers who steal corpses for dissection or
anatomical research. He instructs them to bury him in a lead coffin, most
commonly used to preserve the body from corruption in preparation for
resurrection on Judgment Day. Then he instructs them to put that lead coffin in
a patent coffin, which were fitted with “escape devices” that were used to
prevent live burial. The surgeon also requests to be buried and locked in his
brother’s church. At this point, the surgeon has gone to great lengths to
preserve his body, or protect it from dissection. He requests for three men to
stand guard with weapons to “save me if he can” (162) and keep watch of his
body for three weeks. The parson and undertaker follow all of the surgeon’s
instructions. Joseph offers them increasing quantities of gold as the days
proceed. The parson and undertaker finally give in on the third day. The
catalyst for their deviation from the surgeon’s instructions is simply the
sound of “the guineas chink” (164).
There is an
overall irony in this poem, to be found in the surgeon’s confession that “all
kinds of carcasses I have cut up” (161). He goes into detail about the lengths
he has gone to for monetary gain, “made candles of infants fat” and research,
“bottled babes unborn”, or what seems like simple sadism. He warns the Parson and Undertaker to show
his physical body the respect he failed to show even the most innocent of
babies. The ending, “what became of the Surgeon’s soul was never to mortal
known” (173) suggests the surgeon is so preoccupied with the preservation of
his body after death that he disregards the salvation of his soul. And everyone
else in the poem sees his body as merely a commodity.
1.
Is there relevance in the repetition of the
surgeon’s instructions and the carrying out of these instructions?
2.
Is there symbolism in the surgeon’s preference
to be buried in lead and weighed down so that “he might rise no more” (168).
How is this specifically symbolic to the question of his soul?
Along with its pair poem, “The Old Woman of Berkeley,” this poem exemplifies Southey’s realist gothic. As you note, the poem’s conclusion suggests that the surgeon has been so obsessed with his body that he has forgotten to look after the condition of his soul. This suggests a critique of his focus on the body in both life and death, equating his practice of dissection with an overly developed attachment to the object world to the exclusion of a spiritual dimension. Repetition is one of Southey’s most obvious poetic devices in this pair of poems. It serves to emphasize the Surgeon’s obsession with objects, and how all his precautions are undone by the lure of another object, the guinea. The guinea, however, is not just any object: money, as Marx says, reduces objects to their exchange value, erasing the labor of production through commodification and consumption. This may be why the Surgeon’s labors are all in vain: he is destined to be dissected because he has participated in the commodification of bodies (surgeon’s would pay for corpses they could dissect for students).
ReplyDelete