I don’t mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Dad was fond of the saying “dead as a doornail.” Dad was fond of a lot of colorful expressions, some of which can be attributed to his West Virginia upbringing: “sure as God made little green apples,” “ain’t got the sense God gave a turkey,” and, my personal favorite, “cute as a speckled pup on a little red wagon.”

Two copies of Inklings with a sealed bag of rough-looking iron nails. The bag reads, "Coffin Nails."
Two high school lit mags, topped with the deadest nails of all

At some point in high school, I wondered why “dead as a doornail” became the ultimate measure of annihilation. Dickens wryly suggests the phrase is “the wisdom of our ancestors.” Sure enough, it was already old hat when a guy named Shakespeare used it in Henry IV Part 2.

“Look on me well,” snarls the hangry Jack Cade. “I have eat no meat these five days; yet, come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more.”

Spoiler alert: somebody dies, but it’s not the other six guys.

So this poem is high-school me wrestling with the question. I blame my father. And possibly Marley. And I should probably apologize profusely to anyone who makes it to the end.

Just How Dead is a Doornail?

Just how dead is a doornail,
and how came this doornail to die?
Hung, shot, stabbed, crushed by a whale,
fallen fifty stories in an effort to fly?
Then, perhaps, by the end of this tale,
you won’t care how, or when, or why.

When it gets itself got I have paid for a plot
inside a Kroger parking lot. Flowers, lilies, have I bought,
morbid now are all my thoughts, but the doornail sickens not.
Though we two have never fought, Doornail’s deathwatch is my lot.
            And the doornail does not die.

The villains are foiled, the waters are oiled,
the pure have been soiled and the workers have toiled.
The snakes are uncoiled and the lobsters are boiled,
the sun-bathers broiled and great treasures despoiled.
            But the doornail . . . does not die.

Time crawls by and shall ne’er again fly
as I wait for nail nigh to finally die,
and I ask why, O Great God on High,
why, O God, why have I this curiosity?
            For this doornail does not die!

While my plants have died and my chicken’s fried,
the brave heroes hide and the honest have lied.
They succumb to the tide no one can abide;
we’re fit to be tied, and the whole world has cried.
            Yet the doornail will not die!

            Gnats live days and flies just weeks,
            and everyone dies and begins to reek . . .

But the doornail never ages, nor war on illness wages,
and my heart inwardly rages as I live out life’s last stages.
We all find our coffin cages as we flutter through the ages,
and the poets pin their pages from the heroes’ hemorrhages—

            BUT THE DOORNAIL . . . DOES NOT . . . DIE!

Originally published in Inklings, the literary arts magazine of PCHS, 1991. Additional blame and/or credit to Monica Hoel, for keeping the existential angst of domestic ironmongery in her desk and in her heart.