In this poem, death is addressed much more directly, but Fenton does not attempt to explain it. Rather, it uses our humanity (something we can all understand and have experienced) to outline the riddle of death. In juxtaposing the living with the dead, but making sure to show that all the dead were once alive and that all the living will soon be dead, he achieved something I have never seen in any writing: the sense that we understand death. Death was made intimate, accessible to me, even if we really cannot know its effects as living people. Using our most basic and universal human needs – desire for validation, fear of being forgotten etc., Fenton creates an image of personality so singular that it not only defies gender, race or creed, but defies the barrier of death itself . Death becomes another aspect of our life, a difference between the living and the dead that, although significant, does not change our foundations