sai kumar asked 7 years ago
What killed the six ‘humans’, as stated towards the end of James Patrick Kinney’s poem ‘The Cold Within’?
In Kinney’s poem, the six persons apparently died from the cold atmosphere. But the poet argues that it was not the cold outside, but the cold within their heart, the lack of compassion that killed them.
According to James Patrick Kenney’s poem all the six people died due to cold. But the actual reason was that they died because of “the cold within” — the lack of warm of human spirit in their heart – which brought their death in the end.
According to the poet, the six people who were trapped in the harsh and bitter cold died not because of the cold outside, but the cold within them. He wants to explain the readers that they died due to the coldness of prejudice, malice, selfishness and suspicion for each other, inside their hearts. They were so selfish that they did not give their log of woods to fuel up the fire and to save each other.
In this poem, six humans were killed not from the cold atmosphere. They were killed by the cold inside their heart. As all six humans were showing discrimination among themselves, this showed that they did not have humanity.
Six persons in the poem ‘the cold within’ were killed by the ‘shared apathy’ of cold heart addressed as ‘cold within’ in the poem.