What is the meaning of David Ferry's poem "At the Hospital"?

David Ferry
is the author of at least two poems titled At the Hospital. One of them is extremely brief and
reads as follows in its entirety:

She was the sentence the
cancer spoke at last,

Its blurred grammar finally clarified.

Like Ezra Pounds famous poem In a Station of the Metro, this work
depends for much of its effectiveness on its brevity and surprise. The poem alludes to a death
that has already occurred €“ a death that was apparently long in coming. (This fact makes the
abruptness of the poem all the more powerful.) The poem also benefits from various kinds of .
Thus, in this work, the human described is not the speaker but is the sentence spoken. The human
is not in controlled but is controlled. Also ironic is the fact that although we normally
welcome clarity, in this case the clarity is painfully regrettable. The poem implies the brevity
of life and how brief the precise moment of death can also be. The dead person is not compared
to a book but merely to a final sentence. The final word €“ clarified €“ seems highly
paradoxical, since clarification is typically something we desire, whereas here it is cause for
remorse. Note, however, that the tone of the poem is highly objective and matter-of-fact. The
speaker resistsand sentimentality. He does not openly grieve, but his grief is abruptly implied.
In one last note of irony, he answers the "death sentence" imposed by cancer with a
commemorative sentence of his own.

Ferrys other poem titled At the Hospital
is much longer and even more complex.  A simple paraphrase might make its meanings clearer. It
opens by describing at least two people moving down the brightly lit corridor of a hospital. In
some ways they move as quietly as angels might move, while in other ways they move with the
quiet, emotionless efficiency of policemen who are not supposed to reveal the purpose of their
approach. Line 5 implies that these approaching persons are bringing news of health and
gladness, but by the end of the stanza the tone has darkened, as the speaker mentions his
sister, nicknamed Betts, who lies dying on a wretched bed at the bottom of her room. The
speakers memory of this walk dates to the 1960s, a period of great turmoil in the United States
€“ turmoil to which the poem now alludes.

It was in 1968, for instance, that
Senator Robert Kennedy of New York was assassinated while running for President. His own
brother, President John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated in 1963, and Martin Luther King, the
great civil rights leader, had been assassinated shortly before Robert Kennedy himself was
gunned down. Images of Robert Kennedy, as he lay dying in the hotel where he had been shot, were
broadcast over and over and over again on television.

Knowledge of these
facts makes sense of the opening lines of the second stanza:

Above her head, on the television screen,

Endlessly dying on the
hotel floor,

Lay Bobby Kennedy.

If the
first stanza had momentarily seemed to suggest hope for the dying sister, the second stanza
suggests the inevitability of death.

In both poems, then, with a certain
amount of irony, hospitals are associated not with health but with death.