This is about the beauty of a nuclear bomb exploding, which is about to kill a watching family (and by extension) all life on earth.
Coow, yes, and it's interesting that he doesn't sing the first line of Old's poem. The most pessimistic word in the poem is the "only" in the first line, which implies that the bomb WILL go off for sure. By leaving that part out, the "WHEN" of the title also becomes a question about whether the bomb will go off, rather than the straightforward assertion of the poem that it WILL go off.
Slightly more ambiguous and open to possibility than the absolute miserableism of the Olds poem.
This is about the beauty of a nuclear bomb exploding, which is about to kill a watching family (and by extension) all life on earth.
Coow, yes, and it's interesting that he doesn't sing the first line of Old's poem. The most pessimistic word in the poem is the "only" in the first line, which implies that the bomb WILL go off for sure. By leaving that part out, the "WHEN" of the title also becomes a question about whether the bomb will go off, rather than the straightforward assertion of the poem that it WILL go off.
Slightly more ambiguous and open to possibility than the absolute miserableism of the Olds poem.