# Sestettes explained — The Book of Jade

> Chapter companion for The Book of Jade by David Park Barnitz.

## What happens

A series of eight sestettes exploring the paradoxical relationship between pain and joy, love and death, and the ultimate emptiness of both sadness and gladness. The speaker embraces suffering as a path to divine transformation, eroticizes death, and ultimately rejects all emotional states as unreal.

## Themes in this chapter

### Death and Decay

Death is central throughout: as a source of ecstasy, a mockable figure, and a horrifying physical reality of worms and decay.

### Eroticism and the Femme Fatale

The beloved is described with cruel beauty, priestess and victim, and the speaker's love is intertwined with death and blasphemy.

## Character check-ins

### Unknown

The speaker who addresses the beloved, celebrates woe, and contemplates death and love.

### Death

Personified as a figure to be mocked, blasphemed, and ultimately embraced as the supreme ecstasy.

## Key lines

> Thou shalt rejoice for woe: The pallid goblet old, That holds thy life’s dull wine, Is made thereby divine; Stain’d with a purpler glow, And wrought in stranger gold.

You should find joy in suffering: the pale old cup that contains your boring life becomes sacred, colored with a deeper glow and crafted in unusual gold.

_The speaker reinterprets pain as a transformative, almost alchemical force._

> Death is death; the little host that squirms, The smell, the dark, the coffin clos’d, and I So soft, so soft; no movement, and no breath; No ears, no nose, no eyeballs; Death is Death; The sepulchre, no sight, no sound, no cry, And always; Death is Death; the worms! the worms

Death is simply death: the squirming mass of maggots, the stench, the darkness, the sealed coffin, and my body soft and still—no senses, no movement, no breath, no sound, forever—just worms.

_A stark, visceral depiction of physical decay, rejecting any romanticized view of death._

> Heart, we have wholly drain’d the cup of sadness, And found in sadness no reality; Now from the night of sadness let us go. Henceforward let us drain the cup of gladness, And find in gladness no reality; From sadness then and gladness let us go.

My heart, we have completely drunk the cup of sorrow and discovered it has no substance; let us leave the night of sorrow. Now let us drink the cup of joy and find it also has no substance; then let us leave both sorrow and joy.

_The speaker concludes that both sadness and gladness are illusions, and seeks to transcend them both._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/the_book_of_jade_se/chapters/part-ii-sestettes
- Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/the_book_of_jade_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/the_book_of_jade_se/chapters