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Teachers & SchoolsDeath
"Nothing lasts," or so the speaker of "Flare" tells us, right off the bat. In fact, she spends a good deal of the poem exploring death and how we relate to it. There's the death of her parents, the impending death of the moth, and the unmentioned but clearly evoked fact that we all die. In the face of death, she urges us to live vitally, to be feisty and exuberant, rather than mopey and blue.
For our speaker, death is not something to be feared, but rather a reason for living all the more vibrantly and fully.
In this poem, a big part of embracing nature is embracing the only fact of life: death.