The dark has returned. Daylight Saving Time ended three weeks ago, and although the change was immediate from the experiential point of view, it has taken some time for the gloom to set in. This somber turn is not simply a calendrical phenomenon. I think most elderly people share the sensation that the autumnal reality, which surely everyone experiences, becomes more poignant each year. And “poignant” is really a rather gentle adjective for what we experience. I think that oppressive would be more accurate. That is, the waning of the year seems more threatening, more inevitable, the more acutely you become aware of your own withering, waiting, and wasting. The supposedly cheering question—if winter comes, can spring be far behind?—no longer has its solace. It becomes a real question.
But its answer, if only after real reflection, must be in the affirmative. Surely the annual death of nature is at least by implication a demonstration also of annual revival or renewal? How could the human mind be so blinkered and ungenerous as to think otherwise? We all are subject to the iron laws of our physical existence. I have undoubtedly written about this topic before. Perhaps I have written about it every year I have been writing these essays. I do remember one essay—I think probably just a year ago—in which I talked a bit about Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” written in 1819 a few years before his youthful death. And death was on his mind. In another of his great odes (“Nightingale”) written in a remarkable spasm of invention without which English poetry would be so much less than it is. Whether it was a spasm of transcendent perception or of alarming neuroticism, he says in so many words “I have been half in love with easeful death.” But Keats had barely turned twenty when he wrote that. I am up against ninety.
Certainly the poets have written a great deal about death. Many of our greatest poems are about it. If art does indeed hold up the mirror to nature, that can be no surprise. The laws of thought must lead us to conclude that there is more death in the world today than there has ever been before, for the simple reason that there is a larger population of mortal humans than there has ever been before. That is another way of saying there is more life too. Though I am a medievalist, I am a twentieth-century one. I should not prefer to have lived in, say, 1400, when experts reckon that the world population was perhaps one twenty-fifth of what it is today and therefore perforce also its mortality rate. There remains a certain paradox, however. Though death surrounds us everywhere in our newspapers and on our screens, it is but rarely in our personal daily experience, as it would have been in centuries not long ago.
I have watched some of the new Ken Burns series on the American Revolution. It has inevitably set me to thinking about the infancy of our republic. And since I am a literary scholar, it perforce brings to mind some of our earliest writers. There are, according to my judgment, but two important poets produced in our early republic: Phyllis Wheatley (d. 1784) and William Cullen Bryant (b. 1794). Both of them could be somber.
The title of one of Wheatley’s most represented poems is a short essay in itself: “To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death of the Lady's Brother and Sister, and a Child of the Name Avis, Aged One Year.” Here the dead outnumber the living by a ratio of three to two. This poem, while utterly conventional in its poetic diction and its consolatory message, is nevertheless very polished in its construction. Its aesthetic is that praised by Alexander Pope as “true wit”, to wit, “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.” Bryant’s only famous poem, written when he was seventeen years old, has the inkhorn title of “Thanatopsis”—which should mean, I suppose, “Looking at Death”. If a seventeen-year-old boy could write that, I suppose it not too surprising that my teachers could think a twelve-year old boy ought to read it. In any event, “Thanatopsis” is the first poem I can remember being assigned in school. At home, my grandmother had introduced me much more gently to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. So In winter I get up by night and dress by yellow candlelight….
The old Christian poets could be confident perhaps even arrogant in their attitudes toward death. Think of Donne’s “Death be not proud…” Modern poets, when they do confront it head on, are likely to do so with bitterness, even bellicosity. Does anyone still read Dylan Thomas? Some still delight in “A Child’s Christman in Wales,” but more will turn their minds first to the poet’s savage protest as his father lay dying:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Or the more direct, but quite possibly intentionally ironic
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon…
The sentiment
of this poem is explicitly, perhaps oppressively, biblical. But one can almost smell the ironic intention
in the phrase that good night. The
connection of death with sleep in simile and metaphor is doubtless a cliché of
world literature. The final lines of
Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” use it in what the poet intends as a positive, at least
consolatory sense. Thomas is pretty
clearly invoking the expected religiosity of the Welsh chapel. The title is “And Death Shall Have No
Dominion”. That is an explicit citation
of the Apostle Paul (Romans 6:9) “….Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no
more; death hath no more dominion over him.”
It would be foolish to claim to understand the plain meaning of
this text for it is a poetic idea itself, and poems rarely have plain
meanings. But it would appear that that
Paul is speaking of a literal resurrection of Jesus and of a metaphorical
resurrection—that is, the moral transformation—of Jesus’s followers. Whether this is in any sense pious, on the
other hand, must surely be called into question by the poem’s unmistakable
anger. I think it may have been
Chesterton who said of Thomas Hardy that he could never forgive God for not
existing. I see something of similar
suggestion here.
One of the most successful
poems of the English eighteenth century was written by a writer otherwise
rather obscure: Edward Young. Its title
is The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts
on Life, Death, & Immortality, better known simply as Night-Thoughts. It is nearly as long as its subject might
suggest. Its popularity was enormous,
and there are many echoes of it to be found in our infant American
writings. Quotations from it are to
found on the tombstones of some of our oldest burial places.
In an absorbing book dealing with the some of the social effects of the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust, former president of Harvard, studied the rituals of mourning created during the war’s carnage. In many of them one hears the echoes of The Complaint. Fortunately the brightness of a new day dispels the gloom of night. I started writing this in darkness. As I finished writing, the sun had just broken through what seemed but an hour earlier an impenetrable fog. That seemed a pretty obvious invitation to conclude.
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