0.0 Foreword

Growing up in a Catholic environment, that is, a Catholic primary and middle school education along with a church-going father, I was exposed from an early age to a multitude of hymns, prayers, parables, biblical tales, sentiments, sayings, phrases, metaphors, stories, analogies, songs, and poems to do with the Christian faith. One of these articles, the subject of this inquiry, was a particular favourite both of my school and of my paternal family, pa included, but it was not until my late teens that I actually considered the poem in any depth. Throughout my childhood it had simply been, along with many other texts in the same category, a thing which the authoritarian people around me, i.e. adults, found incredibly interesting, and yet which I did not. I attributed my disinterest to simply being too young to understand, however once I grew older, and was confident that my capacity to understand incredibly interesting texts was sufficient, I was surprised to find that I still failed to be awed by it to the extent that the elders of my youth were. Indeed, perhaps this failing caused me to resent the poem itself, or perhaps my resentment was due to disliking the poem of its own merit, but regardless, I eventually decided to compile this analysis, in order to bring to bear, or perhaps uncover, some of the issues with the text, both in composition - the construction of a comprehensive narrative - and in interpretation - how the poem might affect people’s decisions and indeed lives. In the former I feel I have succeeded, although in the latter I have failed. Over the course of writing this analysis I lost track of the second goal, and instead focused completely on a number of specific interpretations. I feel that while this analysis does admittedly contain a certain amount of unverifiable speculation, I have not sufficiently studied ethics to say whether or not the poem gives an appropriate message to those who have lost hope or may otherwise turn to religion in a time of strife. Because of this, the analysis will remain solely a literary one, without delving into such meta-issues.