Death and the Poet

Phyllis Wheatley
 

            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….

William Cullen Bryant (probably a few years after "Thanatopsis")
 

            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.

Death of a Great Lady

 

            We landed at Newark Liberty Airport on Monday, after a nine-hour  flight from Nice, precisely at the advertised time of 4.30pm, there to be picked up by our friend and former USPS letter-carrier, Mike Downes.  When a few months ago he retired from the postal service and quit delivering mail, it left him more time for his avocation of operating a boutique limousine service delivering people, mainly to and from airports.

 

            There is always comfort in returning to home base, though our minds remain full of the sights, sounds, fragrances, and tastes of Provence.  Some famous historian or another famously said that the most important event in eighteenth-century England happened in France.  The reference, of course, was to the French Revolution.  So I suppose it is not extraordinary that the most important event of our French vacation happened in England: the death of the Queen on September 8, four days before our return.  Of course, the death of a personage of such importance would have claimed international attention under any circumstances.  The political and cultural significance of the Queen’s reign has been endlessly discussed by experts in the press.  What has captured my own attention is the operation of social memory.   Few world leaders have been on the scene for seven decades, and few have been the objects of the evident admiration and respect of so many for so long.  But our group gathered together for the house party in Salernes—eight of us briefly, and six of us for most of the time—perhaps had its special reasons.  With the exception of myself, everyone there was a native-born Briton who had come of age in the early years of the Queen’s reign.  Five of us had been students together at Oxford in the late 1950s.  My one and only “meeting” with the Queen and Prince Phillip took place there, when I was rounded up by some desperate college administrator trying to put together a panchromatic group of foreign students for royal review.  The Duke of Edinburgh made a quip about the insufficiencies of British central heating. 

 

Halley's Comet smiles on William the Conqueror 

 

            Rarely enough are we self-consciously aware that we are experiencing something “historic”, but the death of magnates is an occasion when many do.  In earlier centuries people believed that the very heavens proclaimed the birth and death of great princes, as well as their great deeds, in meteor showers and comets.  What we now know as Halley’s Comet smiled on the Norman Conquest of Britain, and is recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry.  As we sat around the table hearing the news, somebody said, “I will remember where and when I was when I first heard this news--forever.”  This was an almost theatrically solemn remark and solemnly delivered.  But it was a sentiment we all understood, and one frequently commented upon in the press, as it seems to be commonly shared.  Liz Truss, who had been invited by the Queen two days before she died to form a government, had been the subject of much conversation—not all of it complimentary—in earlier days.   The whole period of our stay was a kind of running feast and symposium—wonderful conversation, much of it over wonderful meals.  We all have vivid memories of the circumstances in which we learned of certain private events.  But there is a very limited number of public events that command an almost universal racial memory.  The analogy frequently drawn in my age group was with the death of President John Kennedy by an assassin’s bullet on November 22, 1963.  If you were alive and sentient then, you almost certainly remember, and vividly, the circumstances of where and when you heard of it.  The more recent event seared forever into our memory, and especially the memory of younger people, is learning the  news of the Twin Towers attack on September 11, 2001.

 

            I heard of Kennedy’s assassination as I was walking up a hill between classes on the campus of the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison.  I was in my first semester as a college teacher.  I was twenty-seven years old.  In the buzz of the crowd moving up the hill, a graduate student was loudly finding a silver lining in his reported news: this unthinkable event would permanently discredit the right-wing fanatics of the John Birch Society, the MAGA-monsters of that age.  Who could have suspected Kennedy was killed by the only Communist in Texas?  Like most of my friends I greatly admired JFK.  I also fancied that I had a personal connection with him.  After all, in the middle of  a hot, muggy day in July of 1958, as I sweated on the pavement in a coat and tie, I had seen the man himself in the flesh as he wheeled around the  circular drive of Columbus Circle abutting Union Station in Washington.  His open red convertible passed within ten feet of me as I stood waiting for the light to change.  There was a good-looking blonde woman laughing in the passenger’s seat.  It was all too perfect.  Golden youth.  Camelot.  I could not have invented it if I tried.  And now on Bascom Hill I suddenly learn he is probably dead.

 

            But that was already the second presidential death announcement that I shall never be able to forget.  On an April day of 1945, still a month short of my ninth birthday, I was walking through an alley shortcut in east Denver on my way home from school.  I was in the company of a contemporary and neighbor whose name, I regret to say, has long since disappeared from my memory.  But I shall never forget the encounter we had along the way.  A woman was standing in the middle of her small, tidy back lawn, separated from the alleyway by a likewise tidy white picket fence.   She was weeping profusely, and not very quietly.  She was surprised to see us, and the sight of us seemed only to intensify her distress.  “Boys,” she said, “boys!  Boys…I have to tell you.  Boys, our president is dead.”  We knew who the President was and what “dead” means.  But the news itself made less impression than it should.  What I mainly grasped was that a woman was weeping uncontrollably.  So far as my grasp of world events was concerned, the war news was all good.  Hitler was “finished” according to a pontificating next-door neighbor.  Soon we would “finish” Japan.  Then my dad would be home from fighting in the Pacific.  But I shall never forget that weeping woman.

 

            I say “never forget”, though can I trust memory?  Already Joan and I have somewhat differing accounts of learning of Queen Elizabeth’s death.  We can agree that we were all gathered around a table when we heard the news, but disagree as to which table.  In any event, the associations of the event will always be complex: the jarring intrusion of the news of death into a Provençal idyll.

 

                Entrecasteaux (Var): garden by Le Nôtre (1613-1700), photo by Joan, backside by blogger
 

Death Notices

 

 

One of William Blake's Illustrations for Young's Night Thoughts

            Does every ying require its yang?  Last week I was glowing with optimism inspired by a musical concert.  This week quite by accident, I found myself nagged by “night thoughts,” to use the gloom-and-doom term featured in the title of Edward Young’s famous poem of the mid-eighteenth-century, wildly popular on both sides of the Atlantic.  The poem is all about death, a topic the mind may naturally, though by no means necessarily unhealthily, turn to when one gets old.   Young surely inspired Emily Dickinson’s great (and mercifully shorter) thanatological masterpiece “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers”: Safe in their Alabaster Chambers/Untouched by Morning/And untouched by noon/Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, /Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone. If “rafter of satin” doesn’t creep you out, what would?  Well, what might do so could be the brief introductory essay by Martin Malia, the great Soviet scholar, in The Black Book of Communism, in which he sadly, dispassionately, offers a comparative glance at the numbers of people murdered by Nazis for the crime of their race and the number murdered by Communists for the crime of their social class.  In searching for a bibliographical reference, I inadvertently stumbled upon Malia’s enormous estimates of the hecatombs.

 

            During the Covid pandemic the daily actuarial reports of which Defoe writes in his Journal of the Plague Year are now features of the nightly news.  Certain publications have actually made printing history with their innovative “visuals”—charts and graphs conveying complex information in fine detail.  Though still penny-ante when compared with the political murders of the last century, world-wide Covid mortality has been horrendous.  In our country alone the deaths approach a million.  But equally horrendous also are some other disturbing statistics.   In a recent squib on the PBS New Hour the Covid announcement was supplemented by the news that drug overdose deaths in America last year topped 100,000, slightly exceeding the 95,000 “alcohol-related” ones.  For a particular reason I shall come to later, it will be the alcohol ones I will be pondering  most deeply in this post, but only after mentioning two other categories in which our nation is on the leadership board: vehicular deaths and gun deaths.

 

            In recent years there have been about forty thousand traffic deaths and forty-five thousand “gun-related” deaths in the United States annually.  The term “gun-related” may seem more oblique than necessary, as the “relationship” between the gun and the dead person is actually pretty clear.  A projectile fired from the former has effected the death of the latter.  With regard to highway carnage, we seem to have come to an unstated social consensus that it’s just awful, but whacha gonna do?  There's a price to doing business.  Some of the casuistry over gun deaths is perhaps animated by the fear that we might actually do something to stop them, but will perhaps feel less inclined to do so if we know that about half of all the gun-dead shot themselves quite intentionally, and that perhaps none of the children shot in their strollers were “the intended victim”.

 

            As it happens, I was encountering these gloomy statistics on the Monday and Tuesday of last week while I was still on the high of the symphony concert that I wrote about in my last post.  But blog day was followed immediately by chemotherapy day-–hardly an ordeal any more but still unpleasant enough and laden with intimations of pathology not improved by my recent contemplation of catalogues of macro-mortality.  Illness can complicate your view of many subjects, including some, like narcotic addiction, on which I might have thought I had a firm and unassailable view.  But if you are feeling really lousy and somebody gives you a pill that more or less instantly makes you feel really great, it may make you stop and ponder a moment.  How many Opioid deaths begin in such apparently simple fashion?

 

            Trying to read anything very serious while surceasing sorrow by medical infusion is a lost cause, so I often take a book of short stories to infusion.  This time it was one of my two thick volumes of Mauppasant: inexhaustible, and many of the stories really short.  Picking among them at random I found myself reading one called “The Baptism”.* This turned out to be a mistake.  The story begins with an old navy doctor taking a drink of cognac with a friend or friends.  He proposes a toast to “that charming poison…seductive murderer, and destroyer of people”—alcohol!  He suggests they have probably read Zola’s recent L’Assommoir (1877)—one of the most terrifying of many fictional treatments of the social disaster of alcoholism—but have they ever seen, as he has, the effects of alcohol introduced by the French and the English on the native populations of their colonial territories?  Or, he might have added, the laboring classes of their own native land?   Because that is what his brief tale concerns.  Years ago, he spent time over Christmas at an old family property in the countryside of the Breton coast.  Living on the place was a peasant who with his wife and sister-in-law looked after things.  The wife has a baby, and the proprietor was asked to stand as godfather.  Oh,  and also to front the parents money for the priest’s fee.  On the day of the baptism the January weather is freezing, and the priest is late in arriving.  Nonetheless, to the doctor’s horror the peasants insist on honoring their folk custom that the infant be kept stripped naked until the sacrament is performed.  The priest, moving at the speed of a “sacred turtle” shows no concern for this dangerous barbarity, his concern being the extortion of another five francs from the godfather.  The ceremony finally over, the parents and most of the baptismal party go off to a tavern to celebrate—meaning, for them, getting blind drunk.  When the alcohol runs out, they drink lamp fuel.  By next morning both babe and mother are dead.  It is just that abrupt,  Maybe I have read something more depressing.  Possibly Eli Wiesel’s Night.

 

            Why do the Breton fishermen drink themselves to death?  Because, the narrator says, when drunk they no longer see the foam atop the storm-tossed waves, only the waves themselves.  In a similar way the sweated textile workers of Britain’s Industrial Revolution found that “gin is the quickest way out of Manchester.”  There have been great medical advances in the use of chemotherapy, but I believe a basic paradoxical strategy remains: fighting fire with fire, the calculated administration of selected poisons.  This must be a rather delicate business, and probably never wisely self-administered. For Maupassant’s peasants the pain of daily life must have been very great indeed.  Yet certainly the coal-oil treatment was worse than the disease.  We speak of combating cancer and battling Covid, but two hundred thousand annual deaths from the self-administration of supposed palliatives suggest some huge cosmic snafu.  Death is a universal certainty and needs no extra help in performing its work.  Our catalogues of mega-deaths recording the operations of disease and natural disasters need not be swollen further by the depravity and folly of our species.

 

             

 

*I later discovered that Maupassant has two very different stories, with very different tones,  by the same name—“Le baptême”.  The shocking tale I describe is his second, from 1885 .  The first (1884) is tender and affirmative in its attitude to peasant life.