This Hour and What Is Dead Themes
Family
A brother, a father, and speaker. Sounds like a family to Shmoop, and an interesting one at that. For the first two thirds of "This Hour and What Is Dead," our speaker talks about his deceased brot...
Mortality
We're going to go ahead and state the obvious here: with a word like "Dead" in the title, this poem is probably more than a little about death. In fact, "This Hour and What Is Dead" is downright ob...
Love
The love of a brother. The love of a father. The love of God. Each one of these loves is addressed in "This Hour and What Is Dead." In fact, the word "love" itself pops up four times in this short...
Exile
In "This Hour and What Is Dead," everyone seems to be running away from something. The father is about to head off on a journey, the brother's homeland is in torches, and the speaker himself is a "...