Simon,
"Soc" in this case is short for "Socrates" I believe, so that'd be "sock" I think.
I'm not aware that "Vince" is the father. I suppose he may have been, but it's certainly not "in" the poem. Indeed, if the father is Vince, then his final words make rather a mockery of his "last confession", don't they? Thus, that "Vince wins" statement is the part of the poem I do not understand.
However, I think the relationship with Soc Glasrud is adequately laid out for this poem to stand alone; S1 clearly shows him to be a contemporary of, and close friend of, the speaker's father. The first line of the couplet, where the speaker anticipates being a pallbearer at Soc's funeral-to-come, speaks firmly to the closeness of the relationship between the son and his father's friend and contemporary.
Sharon,
In S1 we have a description of Soc Glasrud's face eroded by time and the elements. In S2 we have the father's face ravaged by a sudden accident. A well-wrought parallelism, to my mind. The "four years dead" does give us pause, but it doesn't require the creation of a 4th person. At least not for me. It just makes me realize that the speaker is in media res, so to speak — he's looking back on his father's funeral and anticipating Soc's funeral to come. So in that sense there is no "present, dead person" in the poem.
(robt)
|