Analysis of "World's End" by Victoria Chang

 

"Will earth stop spinning?"  There's a certain coldness with Earth being lowercased.  It's just another planet known by designation rather than the place we live, or used to live if it's the world end.  The opening line goes from a cold grandiosity to "Will there only be hair left?" which is human.  I get the sentiment.  After we die, hair will continue to grow.  But I've read that this is a lie and hair appears to grow because we the body decays and shrinks giving the appearance of longer hair.  But this line is not about truth, it's about what a possible human leaves behind -- something personal that grow out even after death -- or rather would any physical trace of humanity be left?

After these two rhetorical question, the poem makes a statement, "We are made of war--" which juxtaposes the hair line what physical makes us.  If we are made of war, a concept, then this is the psychological us, the metaphorical us, the us that's always in conflict.

"It stays in the air, mixed with oxygen, we breathe / it in and deploy it out."  War is something we breathe in and is mixed with something we need to live oxygen.  The language here plays with the war imagery as we breathe in and "deploy" exhale war and carbon dioxide out by deploying it.  Essentially war is who we are and what we let out.

"Our birth is easy on us / but hard on everything else."  The nouns are vague here.  Who is us?  Humanity.  Well, birth is a painful process -- especially of people who are defined by war, but it's easy here -- like war is easy to build up over time and just release.  

But hard on everything else.  If we are war -- war needs to destroy: others, the surrounding area, connections, families -- everything else, the things we care about and don't care about -- the destructive us, is "hard" to deal with from everything else.  The world ends in litotes.