William Butler Yeats attempts to preserve life through art, specifically in his Byzantium poems, and much like T.S. Eliot attempts to redeem death in The Waste Land as a productive, positive element.  The singer/songwriter Tom Waits has a song that does a little of both at once.  In this song, which is rattly and jangly and rough, we have a protagonist who is crossing what seems to be a wasteland of some sort.  He's being harassed by a black crow --which is a pretty universal symbol of death, from myth to native American folklore to just about anywhere else.  After missing it with a shotgun, the protagonist gets himself a mule, makes a ladder out of old instruments, chases the crow up a tree, and shoves the crow inside his Washburn guitar, comparing the strings of the guitar to the bars of a jail (bars of music?).  The protagonist has literally captured death in an implement of music --in song, the song we're listening to, thereby preserving his life by capturing death.  Each time the song is played, death is captured in the song and life is preserved by the protagonist's capturing death.