Poetry – Page 4 – Brimmings: up from the well

Happiness that Money Can’t Buy

I think we’ve all read E. A. Robinson’s masterful “Richard Cory” poem about a wealthy man, much admired, perhaps envied for his living the good life, who commits suicide.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

In keeping with the poem’s theme, I recently came across a Federal study published in 2002 that showed that rich neighborhoods have higher rates of suicides than less affluent neighborhoods. This finding may come as a surprise to most people who, like those in the poem, equate wealth with contentment.

The obvious question to ask is why money, possessions, fame and power don’t assure us happiness? The answer is that they fall short in the staying power of simpler values, found largely in ourselves, not things subject to life’s vicissitudes and often paid for with daily stress.

Ironically, having money and all it buys may mask an insecurity, or need for validation, compounding one’s misery.

According to Solberg, Diener, and Robinson, “Why Are Materialists Less Satisfied?” (2004), those values that truly sustain come down to a relative few:

Personal health.

Security.

Having goals.

Enjoying a rich relationship with others.

I’d even contend that the four can be reduced to just one, security. Defining security more specifically, what we want most is freedom from anxiety in a world of flux. As Freud might have told us, we’re all children crying in the night. Let’s face it: As human beings we’re possessed by egos that generate our desires and foster our insecurities.

This, of course, may help explain the increasing popularity of meditation to relieve our stress or, better, our fright.

I think Tolstoy, that most moral of writers, gets at the truth in his short story, How Much Land Does a Man Need?:

I would not change my way of life for yours,” said she [to her well off sister]. “We may live roughly, but at least we are free from anxiety. You live in better style than we do, but though you often earn more than you need, you are very likely to lose all you have. You know the proverb, ‘Loss and gain are brothers twain.’ It often happens that people who are wealthy one day are begging their bread the next. Our way is safer. Though a peasant’s life is not a fat one, it is a long one. We shall never grow rich, but we shall always have enough to eat.

Recently I saw Hardy’s magnificent Far From the Madding Crowd at the movies and reread the classic. Observing the reenactment of an agrarian tapestry of defined roles amid resplendent, on locale filming in Dorset, Somersetshire and Oxfordshire (Hardy’s Wessex), I couldn’t help remembering Hardy’s nostalgia for a fast fading bucolic way of life providing security, communal intimacy, and defined roles.

In our own time, in contrast, one only has to read sociologist George Packer’s The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2013) to see the carnage of our free-fall from those nets of safety intrinsic to daily life.

If you were born around 1960 or afterward, you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding. You watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape—the farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories of the Mahoning Valley, Florida subdivisions, California schools. And other things, harder to see but no less vital in supporting” the order of everyday life, changed beyond recognition (pp. 12-13).

How much better the simpler life, free of complication with its inherent risk of loss, lived honestly, even if frugally, ample in the extraordinary goodness of family and friends and the joy of pursuing one’s passion.

Ok, so I’m a sentimentalist, I still hold that those times, lived in the plentitude of the simple values I enumerated earlier, provided far more in the way of genuine happiness than today’s stressful, materialistic world that increasingly marginalizes each of us and holds our contentment hostage.

–rj

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo”: A Close Reading

RECUERDO
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you! for the apples and pears,
And we gave all our money but our subway fares.

It seems almost an anomaly to do a close reading of a poem that seems to not withhold anything in its meaning. Millay tells us that the poem entails–its frame if you will–an all night ferry ride, to and fro, of two companions, ending with the two giving away their previously purchased fruit to a woman either on the ferry or on shore at ride end in the early morning, saving for themselves only their subway fare.

Presumably, this is a poem that captures the frenzied excitement of two lovers, for whom time together, even in a humble setting and with little money (they had bought fruit), is what matters. Millay’s lover-friend, Floyd Dell, one of many, tells us in a 1959 letter that Millay had done the ride with Nicaraguan poet Salomón de la Selva, later affirmed that year by Millay’s sister, Norma, who offered the poem’s Spanish title, “Recuerdo” (i.e., “I Remember”), as evidence. (De la Selva is a lover Milford misses in her biography of Millay (Savage Beauty 2001).

Famously, the poem’s initial two lines, “We were very tired, we were very merry,/We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry” repeat themselves at the beginning of each stanza. Intriguingly, we anticipate a “but” to set up the contrast between the states of fatigue and exuberance, but it doesn’t occur, adding complication, perhaps suggesting the fervency of their passion. The omission could also imply a fatigue leading to silliness.

In their repetition, Millay ensures her readers’ focus on the activities themselves, separately depicted in each stanza: looking into a fire, leaning across a table; lying on a hilltop underneath the moon (stanza 1); eating fruit (stanza 2); buying a morning newspaper, hailing a mother, her head “shawl covered,” to whom they give their remaining fruit (stanza 3).

The references to looking into the fire and lying on a hill-top under the moon may initially appear incongruous in a poem supposedly confined to an all night ferry ride. A closer reading, however, implies they had exited the ferry at some point, perhaps to visit a tavern or café, enjoy the warmth of a fire and, later, lie on a hill top and gaze at the stars before reboarding: “And the whistles kept blowing….”

The mother appellation suggests the lovers’ own freedom from the encumbrances of marital. love. As such, this is a poem intrinsic to the Greenwich Village bohemianism of that era.

While the poem is sparing of the usual metaphors, it turns sharply poetic in the exquisite “And the sky went wan and the wind came cold,/And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.”

As such, it reflects the poem’s latent contrast between their practiced frugality and the plenitude of their love, reinforced at poem end in their giving their fruit away.The poem haunts with its rhythms–hexameter lines replete with feminine and masculine rhymes along with occasional near rhymes, alliteration and assonance, coalescing into a sensuous ambience.

Redolent with the nuances of memory, the poem sparkles with the effulgence of new love and idealization of a day that endures because of it. And like Whitman, the poem sanctifies the individuality of everyday experience. Despite the denigration of Modernists, the poem’s fundamental strength lies in its very simplicity, affording accessibility and enjoyment.

–R Joly

Dickinson Revisits Keats: “I Died for Beauty”

I died for Beauty–but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth was lain
In an adjoining room

He questioned softly “Why I failed”?
“For beauty”, I replied–
“And I–for truth–Themself are One
We brethren, are”, He said–

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night–
We talked between the Rooms–
Until the Moss had reached our lips–
And covered up–Our names–

Emily Dickinson’s favorite poets were John Keats and Robert Browning. Certainly, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “I Died for Beauty” are indubitably linked through their exploration of Platonic idealism in regard to Beauty and Truth.

For Keats, Beauty becomes synonymous with Art, or Imagination. When he famously offers near the ode’s end his maxim, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” he means that what the imagination perceives as real is both beautiful and true. Putting it another way, Art is Truth beautifully rendered.

Dickinson, in contrast, exhibits a more modern, complicated sensibility in her latent suspicion of a priori reasoning. Truth and Beauty, undefined in her poem, are relative terms, not verities. Although she may initially appear accepting of their affinity (i.e., “kindred”) a closer reading indicates that their synthesis isn’t a given. Why are the two entities in separate rooms? Why must they converse “between the rooms”? In short, they’re separate bed fellows.

What does Dickinson connote in the first speaker’s use of “died,” subsequently rendered “failed” by the second speaker? If the two entities are related, it consists in their earnest pursuit of absolutes, or closure within the context of human experience. Ironically, failure, not success, informs their liaison in death as we’ll see in the poem’s conclusion.

For the Platonist Keats, their proffered unity transcends mortality. Not so for Dickinson’s poem in which Truth and Beauty, never articulated, nor the context of their demise, metamorphose into indecipherable headstones, swallowed up by the anonymity of death and its oblivion:

We talked…
Until the Moss had reached our lips–
And covered up–Our names.

In sum, death abrogates every human quest, even the most noble.

–rj

A Poet Reminisces: Essays After Eighty

I have always liked poetry and poets, in particular, because of their sensitivity to human experience.

One poet I like a lot is Donald Hall, a giant among contemporary American poets, although he’s given up the craft, or as he puts it, since “poetry abandoned him.”

Hall is now 85.

Let me assure you, while the tropes may not come as easily as before, his acuity remains vibrant in his newest book, Essays After Eighty, a slim volume of 120 pages, yet filled with reminiscence, keen observation, and sober wisdom.

I first got introduced to Hall by way of his textbook, Writing Well, which I used for a number of years in teaching college composition. The book lived up to its title, emphasizing sentence clarity and how to achieve it, with eloquence added in.

Hall has always been a diligent stylist, whether writing poetry or prose. He confesses that he’s written some individual essay drafts for Essays After Eighty upwards of eighty times to get things said right.

I used to tell my students that the name of the game in all good writing lay in revision, pointing out that scholars have come upon nearly fifty drafts of Yeat’s famed “Second Coming” poem.

I like how Hall says it: “The greatest pleasure in writing is rewriting. My early drafts are always wretched.”

I’ve always held that a good style is etched by its economy, the right words sufficing for empty fillers drowning readers in verbosity; a pleasing rhythm like waves, in and out, upon a sea shore.

Good prose, like poetry, runs lean.

And Hall is the great master.

Let me give you a sampling of Hall’s trademark writing acumen, simple, yet keen with observation, each detail chosen well, verbs especially, accumulating into a verbal, painting, reflecting the ethos of a skilled artisan:

In spring, when the feeder is down, stowed away in the toolshed until October, I watch the fat robins come back, bluejays that harass them, warblers, red-winged blackbirds, thrushes, orioles. Mourning doves crouch in the grass, nibbling seeds. A robin returns each year to refurbish her nest after the wintry ravage. She adds new straw, twigs and lint. Soon enough she lays eggs, sets on them with short excursions for food, then tends to three or four small beaks that open for her scavenging. Before long, the infants stand, spread and clench their wings, peer at their surroundings, and fly away. I cherish them….

Reminiscence weighs heavily upon these essays, not surprising for a writer in his mid-eighties. the ghosts, as it were, looming out of the past–grandparents, Mom and Dad, aunts and uncles, friends; wife Jane Kenyon, the love of his life and fellow poet, succumbing unexpectedly to cancer at age 47.

Even the northern New Hampshire topography has yielded to change, farms giving way to rebirth of forest as the new generation migrates to the prosperous cities of southern New Hampshire.

As I read this moving collection of personal reflections on sundry topics, I made sure to highlight a number of striking passages, and some of them I’ll share with you.

On writing:

As I work on clauses and commas, I understand that rhythm and cadence have little to do with import, but they should carry the reader on a pleasurable journey.

If the essay doesn’t include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails.

Nine-tenths of the poets who win prizes and praises, who are applauded the most, who are treated everywhere like emperors–or like statues of emperors–will go unread in thirty years.

I count it an honor that in 1975 I gave up lifetime tenure, medical expenses, and a pension in exchange for forty joyous years of freelance writing.

I expect my immortality to expire five minutes after my funeral. Literature is a zero-sum game. One poet revives; another gets deader.

On aging:

When I limped into my eighties, my readings altered, as everything did.

In the past I was advised to live in the moment. Now what else can I do.?

On leisure:

Everyone who concentrates all day, in the evening needs to let the half-wit out for a walk.

On mortality:

It is sensible of me to realize that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away.

At some time in my seventies, death stopped being interesting. I no longer checked out ages in obituaries.

These days most old people die in profit-making dormitories. Their loving sons and daughters are busy and don’t want to forgo the routine of their lives.

Essays After Eighty has been a wonderful read for me with its acerbic wit, cogent wisdom, delivered in a simple, yet elegant, style, proving again that the best art conceals itself.

And yet there’s a melancholy that haunts these excursions into reminiscence, a sense that the best is over and, now, there’s just the waiting. As Hall confesses, “My problem isn’t death, but old age.”

Hall, of course, is addressing physical decline with its imposed limitations and dreaded dependency; but surely his words resonate still more–the sense of ephemerality that mocks our labors and brings to an end all that we love most dearly.

For Hall, “There are no happy endings, because if things are happy, they have not ended.”

Still, this work, perhaps his last, formulates a testimony to a life lived well.

And, very rarely, do you find such honest telling.

–rj

Winter Discontent: Dickinson’s “There’s a certain Slant of light”

I’m sitting here in our sunroom, looking out this afternoon on our backyard, smothered with frost. We had our first snow cover a week ago, which came early to Kentucky.

I’m a warm weather lover, and while those around me complain about heat, I say, more is better.

You’d think coming from New England, I’d be more tolerant of snow and ice and lashing wind, but I can tell you that over time I’m liking old man winter much less.

But neither am I some isolated crank in finding winter oppressive.

Take fellow New Englander, Emily Dickinson, for example, that fervent champion of spring and summer, and with them, birds, flowers and even snakes populating her many poems, emissaries of nature’s cornucopia and the inherent goodness of its plentitude.

Understandably, she didn’t soften her distain toward winter in a poem I’ve memorized, “There’s a certain Slant of light.”

I’ve always admired this poem, like so many others she wrote, cerebral, observant, brief, but dependably engaging, centered in detail, redolent in ambience.

Here’s the poem, followed with my commentary:

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance
On the look of Death.

Like so many of Dickinson’s poems, this one deals with death, as ultimately revealed in its closing line. Keenly aware of the temporal, she always dreaded saying good bye to not only visiting friends, but the passage of the temperate seasons.

Appropriately, the poem’s ambience is foregrounded in emerging darkness on a winter afternoon, signified in the angular, or slanted, solstice light. While “Slant” suggests not only a way of seeing things, it more likely connotes a cosmic knife that wounds, amplified in the second stanza’s “hurt” and “scar” allusions.

In the first, stanza, however, this visual image of a slanting light evolves into one of sound, the light being like the “Heft” of Cathedral Tunes, heft denoting heaviness, or the solemnity of perhaps tolling bells or funeral music.

The speaker’s reference here to cathedrals plainly suggests the poem exceeds depiction of a gloomy New England winter’s day, entering into metaphysical concerns embracing religion, God, and mortality.

Dickinson, after all, was not only a rebel in writing non-traditional verse, both formally and thematically, but in her strident skepticism when it came to the assurances of Christianity.

In stanzas two and three, the persona traces the cosmic sources of the day’s oppressive gloom to Deity (1.e., “heavenly hurt,” “an imperial affliction /Sent us of the air”).

As to the specific nature of the transient day’s mood, it is rightfully left ambiguous (“None may teach it–Any–“), underscoring the persona’s angst in a cosmos ruled at best by a silent deity, who allows death’s intrusion into every aspect of nature.

The speaker can only offer analogies in attempting to articulate her resulting emotional dissonance in response to the waning light, since words often prove ineffectual in rendering matters of our psyche: “We can find no scar,/But internal difference/Where the Meanings are.”

The persona’s allusion to the Book of Revelation with its apocryphal judgments, “T’is the Seal Despair,” underscores the angst of this “imperial affliction” in its psychological reign.

In the concluding stanza, two additional analogies appear, the first employing personification: “When it comes’ the Landscape listens–/Shadows hold their breath–”

The pronoun “it” brings us back to the slanted light of the initial stanza, reminding us again that we are at the moment when the winter sun is about to slip below the horizon. With anxious anticipation, afternoon shadows stand at attention like sentries.

In the final analogy, the speaker breaks through with simile to the source of her angst in the sun’s passage: “When it goes, ’tis like the Distance/On the look of Death–”

Or like viewing a corpse, distanced from every human concern.

In the poem’s absence of any proffered reunion or resurrection, Dickinson’s deep vein of skepticism is readily apparent, despite her Puritan forbears and living in a culture still permeated with conservative Christian belief.

But it didn’t come easily to Dickinson, earning my admiration for her candid questioning of cherished communal beliefs. In an early letter, she would confess to “an aching void in my heart which I am convinced the world cannot fill.”

Though often thought of as eccentric, preferring solitude to company, the truth is Dickinson relished her family, had close friends as her extensive correspondence confirms, and received occasional visitors.

Separation from those she loved was always acutely stressful.

And death, of course, which came early and often in her time, was the ultimate ransacker of human bonds. In a three year period she would lose some forty-six friends and relatives.

I share her sensibility when it comes to winter. I miss Nature’s teeming sights, sounds, and smells: my flowers in variegated hues blooming proudly, attended to by murmuring bees; the smell of Spring lilacs; the taste of fresh berries; chickadees in their yellow jackets at the bird feeder, impervious to the wind.

Looking out my window at a checkered landscape of grays and whites on yet another eclipsed day of light on a winter afternoon, I grieve their absence and share the sense of pervasive temporality that so haunted Dickinson.

And thus, like her, I relish the return of every spring, enjoying what I can, while I’m able, and with what light remains.

–rj

Why Memorize a Poem?

I’ve been thinking about memorizing some of my favorite poems. I remember how in the fifth grade in Philly each of us had to take a chair beside our teacher’s desk when our time came and recite a poem of at least 28-lines.

I honesty can’t recall the purpose of the exercise and don’t even remember the poem I chose. I suspect Mrs. Hazlitt was trying to instill in us a kinship with poetry, allowing us to choose freely a poem that struck our fancy and have us, through memorizing it, engage it thoroughly.

Some of the boys I hung out with made quite a feat of it, putting away more than the minimal requirement in pursuit of bragging rights.

I wonder if some teachers still encourage memorizing an occasional poem. I was in education, if you count college teaching, for forty years and can’t remember any pedagogy recommendation or state mandated requirement. Except for my fifth grade teacher, I never bumped into a memorization stipulation again.

As it stands, I’m curious if poetry is given any serious attention in today’s public schools in our information age of sophisticated technology and pervasive teaching to the test, though I suspect it might still happen in the private sector, or prep schools.

I happen to think there’s value in memorizing poetry. Let me count the ways, pilfering a famous line from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet, “How do I Love Thee,” certainly a poem widely loved by the Victorian middle classes and probably frequently memorized by bedazzled lovers.

It exercises my brain: Now don’t laugh. I’ve gathered quite a few years along the way, and I’d like to think, that just maybe, it’s something I can do to ward off dementia or Alzheimer’s. They say doing mind-things like crossword puzzles, chess, Sudoko, or learning a new language may possibly massage our gray matter. Why not add memorization to the list and, while at it, pursue some of the mellifluously expressed truths of human experience?

It helps me navigate stress: I think it much nicer to draw on a Shakespeare passage to relieve a bout with insomnia than count sheep or numbers backward. If you’re into the Bible, young David sang psalms to the troubled King Saul to relieve his anxiety. I can almost guarantee that not a few have found Psalm 23 (the shepherd’s psalm) a good fit for tight places.

It’s an accomplishment in its own right: Hey, how many people today, even among English majors–or profs like me–can strut their stuff with Hamlet’s famed soliloquy or pull off Keats’ glorious seasonal indulgence by reciting his sensory sonnet, ” To Autumn”?

By the way, when I was learning my trade, I was lucky to come across one of the most memorable teachers I would ever encounter, Dr Maddox, up there in years, but able, effortlessly, to take a poem or prose passage in our American Literature class and embellish it with effortless recall of kindred passages across the spectrum. In doing so, he resonated the beauty at the center of literary art.

It makes a poem a part of you: I’m assuming some of you who read my posts enjoy poetry, since I write about poetry every so often or employ it in my blog. It can be hard work, but memorizing a poem has a way of getting into the sinew of your psyche, or what we used to call, soul.

But why bother with the memory stuff when you can just whip out your smartphone and google up your favorite poem?

Besides, poetry memorization was well-suited for times of isolation; but in our electronic age, no such thing. We’re all virtually connected–wherever, whenever. Ours is a noisy, busy, meddlesome world.

In rebuttal, I like how Brad Leithauser put it in his engaging New Yorker piece, “Why We Should Memorize” (2013): “The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen.”

I like that! We wear wedding rings, collect CD’s and DVD’s, record on our VCR’s, store our photos, etc., so they can be with us whenever we want them, and often we do, for they represent life moments when we laughed or cried or were intrigued, spellbound, elated. and, of course, loved–wives, sweethearts, children, friends, pets. As such, they comprise our “spots of beauty” in a sea of flux, bequeathing ports of safety and solace defiant of time.

But when you memorize a poem, it transcends any material repository of recall. Indeed, I think of it as something akin to the communion service, the bread and wine becoming flesh.

I’m with Keats in all this. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” How much more so, when through memory it becomes a salient part of you and me!

–rj

Poetry is Truth in Sunday Clothes

We live busy lives and often it seems difficult to take time out, catch our breath, and maybe just reassess whether what we’re chasing is worth our time and worry.

In a frenetic world, we probably all have a favorite way of finding sanctuary–perhaps taking time off, or traveling to some idyllic spot, or just off to a meal out or a movie with sweetheart or family, or maybe indulging in a hobby or interest. Me, I like gardening.

I know one thing–we all need time-out, moments when we can drench ourselves in silence and apartness, returning renewed and, just maybe, wiser–the gift of self-reflection when we glimpse where we’ve been, and are, and where we need to go.

Cultivating quietness long term means we have to work at it, just like other good things in life. They say practice makes perfect. I don’t know about that, but I do know it makes things better.

Some find meditation important in gaining equilibrium, and I can endorse that, particularly the Zen kind with its focus on mindfulness that affords me access into myself without my need to control.

Lately, I’ve added poetry to ways I can augment my need to exit life’s speedway. I bathe in its wisdom, marvel at its concision, the depths of psyche it plums, its mellifluous stream of words, the cornucopia of tumbling imagery that makes me see again things I’ve missed or erringly tossed or lost in my life’s journey.

We busy ourselves in a world often filled with self-centeredness and aggressiveness that, if we’re not careful, can dull our humanity and turn our hearts to stone. Poetry helps us keep the wolves at bay–the world’s and our own–and with our best self, love and hope again.

Poetry does it all so well.

As poet Joseph Roux marvelously puts it, “Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.”

I like that, and I think you will, too.

–rj

Christina Rossetti’s “After Death”: Her unction to the living

I have always liked the poetry of Christina Rossetti, Victorian England’s foremost female poet. Poetry ran in her genes. Her maternal grandfather had been a poet and translator; and, of course, so was her more famous brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who also excelled at art.

I like to think of her in conjunction with the American poet, Emily Dickinson, our most prominent woman poet; in fact, they share the same birth year, (1830). Both suffered losses in love and never married.

Both were raised in devoutly religious homes. Dickinson’s grandfather was prominent in founding Amherst College, initially a school to train ministers. Rossetti’s mother was an evangelical. Both wrote a cerebral poetry of ardent sensitivity to life around them.

But there are differences, too. Religiously, Dickinson proved rebellious; at times, even skeptical.

On the other hand, Rossetti’s poetry is replete in piety. Still, thematically both poets seem often preoccupied with retreat and mortality. Strikingly, several of their poems feature a persona speaking from the grave.

Here is a poem I’ve always liked and taught in my literature classes for many years. Maybe you will like it too:

After Death

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where thro’ the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And could not hear him; but I heard him say:
“Poor child, poor child”: and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:
He did not love me living but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm tho’ I am cold.

ANALYSIS

In this poem, a deceased person reminisces her funeral. She recalls the man she loved, filled with pity, gazing at her corpse and weeping.

But there is disillusionment on the persona’s part: her friend did “not touch the shroud, or raise the fold/That hid my face, or take my hand in his,/or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head.” In short, he exhibited no commitment, even in the context of death. (It’s not what he does, but what he omits to do that matters here.) At best, his response proves ambiguous and we are left unsure his grief manifests love, for grief is not necessarily synonymous with love. We only know from the persona’s perspective that he “did not love me living.”

Ironically, the persona’s anguish eclipses that of the mourner, for what she yearned for in life was love and not the pity that comes from her death.

The poem’s last lines are saved from self-pity in their matter-of-factness: “He pitied me; and very sweet it is/To know he still is warm though I am cold.”

But the poem with its subtle “I am cold” also returns us to the theme of death and its inexorable alienation from life with which the poem opens. And even more: it hints at the persona’s repressed anguish in the close–“He still is warm though I am cold,” sparing these lines from their seeming sardonic, or derisive, tone. The truth she reaches for is that he did not make use of the opportunity to love her while she lived.

While pity may speak for the mourner’s potentiality for love, death has foreclosed on its possibility.

Mortality’s unction is that we fervently love while we can in this brief parenthesis of light.

–rj

On living with ambiguity

Those of you familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator will recall that its end letter comes down to either a P or a J, denoting perception vs judgment modalities. P types can tolerate, if not thrive on, open-ended movies. Conversely, J’s like their movies to end with all the pieces in place. As essentially an everyday existentialist, I’ve always found bonafide certainty elusive. Thus, I generally come out in the wash as a P, with speculation often more fun for its U-Turn potential than the dead end of the J alternative.

But hold your horses. This doesn’t mean I’m closed to fixed verities and the closure they provide. Who wants to cast his fate with an ambiguous lover, or speculate about whether he’ll have his job next month or, omigod, is it cancer? Like the next guy, I want the bad guys rounded-up and justice meted out. What a wonderful world it’d be if we could truly accept things as they appear, knowing nobody practices deceit, a world with no need for lawyers to protect us from the fraudulent. No need for the clergy either to put right God’s way of doing things. And so with psychiatrists, since there’d be nothing to be anxious about in a world absent of unknowns. But as Voltaire’s Candide discovered the hard way, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds.

I wouldn’t even be writing this entry if it hadn’t been for coming, serendipity fashion, upon Emily Dickinson’s powerful poem, “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” with its blunt rendering of our stumbling angst in a cosmos devoid of moon and stars to light our journey through the metaphysical night, reminding me again of ambiguity’s pervasiveness and our struggles to find our way:

We grow accustomed to the Dark—
When light is put away—
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye—
A Moment—We uncertain step
For newness of the night—
Then—fit our Vision to the Dark—
And meet the Road—erect—
And so of larger—Darkness—
Those Evenings of the Brain—
When not a Moon disclose a sign—
Or Star—come out—within—
The Bravest—grope a little—
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead—
But as they learn to see—
Either the Darkness alters—
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight—
And Life steps almost straight.

Here Dickinson fashions the poem’s edifice by way of analogy from everyday life of our initial difficulty seeing things when suddenly plunged into darkness until our vision adjusts and we find our way, or think we do (“And life seems almost straight”). The equivocation comes in the persona’s almost, which we mustn’t miss in Dickinson’s typical closet subtlety, perhaps mirroring the metaphysical poets Donne and Herbert she read avidly.

When the narrator tells “Of something in the sight/Adjusts itself to Midnight,” we come to the bottom line of how we manage our journey through the psyche’s dark night (“Those Evenings of the Brain”), perhaps through religious faith, a mainstream fixture for many in the Calvinist Amherst of her time.

My point, and I think Dickinson’s as well, is that in a cosmos absent of Divine revelation and explicit meaning, our need for closure–to abolish life’s curves and set its steps straight, exerts itself in human constructs, epistemologically, whether done through provisos of faith or artist metaphor.

It isn’t just nature that abhors a vacuum. We despise it too. In the end, Jung is wrong, for we are all J’s at heart! Life is very often a search for meaning and, if tenuous in its ambiguity, compels us to define it, however vulnerable its artifice.

–rj

Intimations of Mortality: Keats revisited

I have always been fond of the poet, John Keats. Maybe it’s because he seems to have been down on his luck so early in life and I just happen to be drawn to underdogs. When he was just eight, he lost his father, who died falling from a horse. At fourteen, his mother succumbed to TB, a disease that would prey upon the family, taking his brother, Tom, at nineteen and himself at barely twenty-five. Meanwhile, lawyers consumed the family inheritance.

Keats always had a premonition of an early death, not surprising given the family history, but he didn’t know he was already ailing with TB when he became engaged to the girl next door, the coquettish Fanny Brawne in the fall of 1818.

The following year saw Keats penning in a six week period the masterpieces for which he is now famous, poems like “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to Melancholy,” “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Psyche,” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”

On February 3, 1820, he coughed up blood in his bedroom and with his typical courage, exclaimed: “I cannot be deceived in that color; that drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die.”

He would travel to Italy in a last desperate attempt to recover his health, only to die a few weeks later, attended by a lone friend. Today he lies in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery. Engraved on his tombstone is Keats’ chosen epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

I have always been attentive to Keats, visiting his last London Home, Wentworth Place, in lovely Hampton Heath, and his last abode abroad, a small apartment in Rome adjacent to the Spanish Steps, Rome’s gathering place for throngs of young people from across the globe, presumably oblivious in the “mackerel crowded seas” (Yeats) to the drama enacted next door eclipsed by time. I have also been to the cemetery, moved and reflecting on what might have been a different outcome with a better shuffling of the cards of fate.

He had aimed to write the best poetry of which he was capable and though dying so young, achieved a poetry the world still marvels at. No poet, not even Shakespeare, Milton, or Wordsworth achieved such mastery at so young an age, laboring against illness, family misfortune, financial duress, rejection by the critics, and the anguish of loving a flirtatious Fanny, who often provoked his jealousy.

Of all the Romantics, he strikes me as the most poignant, ever aware of life’s brevity, or how temporality colors all, testing the significance of human assertion itself. Paradox always characterizes his poetry and centers in the conflict of dream vs. reality. Unlike many Romantics, Keats ultimately opts for truth in the interplay of mind and feeling.

I have been thinking a lot about him lately in conjunction with the cancer hoops I’ve had to jump through these pastt several months. I had gone to an osteopath seeking relief for my back pain only to be told xrays showed a lump adjacent to the left clavicle, which might be cancerous. A subsequent CT scan, though it showed no malignancy, revealed a large thyroid nodule, and I was again cautioned it might be cancer. They found me a surgeon and in the meantime I had an ultrasound guided fine needle aspiration biopsy, which indicated another, smaller nodule on the left side of the thyroid. The pathology report came back negative.

By then I met with my surgeon, who surprised me in light of the biopsy: “I can’t guarantee you don’t have cancer. FNAs have false negatives up to 20% of the time.”

While waiting for surgery five days away, I visited my dermatologist to check on a knee sore, which turned out inconsequential, Alas, however, she found a black mole that might be melanoma, the most aggressive of cancers. And so I had to go into surgery facing the double whammy of two cancers at separate sites, metastasis a distinct possibility.

The surgery went well. The surgeon didn’t find cancer, so only a partial thyroidectomy was done, allowing me to perhaps avoid medication. But I still hadn’t gotten the lab results on that black mole. I had to actually call to get the report. It was a precursor dysplasia nevus, which can turn into melanoma if not removed. Even though benign, having dysplasia nevi increases your chances of getting melanoma, so it means constant vigil to catch early changes.

And so now you know why my thoughts have been so filled with Keats, though in this medically sophisticated age I’ve come upon some luck this dear poet was denied. Living with premonition of his own demise, Keats wrote what may be my favorite poem, and I mean of any poet,

When I have fears that I may ease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

If you look at this poem carefully, you’ll find it fascinating in its astute organization; for example, the poem actually consists of one sentence, or subordinate clauses coalescing into a main clause at poem end. In turn, this lends an accumulative buttressing of the persona’s earlier mention of his “piled up hopes.”.So many hopes, teeming high, but cut off by mortality.

The poem’s structure also features an antithesis between thinking and feeling in its three quatrains prior to the closing couplet in this Shakespearian sonnet.

Strikingly in consort with its theme, each quatrain moves us closer to the reality of death, with a progressive abstraction in the imagery with each succeeding quatrain:

Increasing abstraction:

rich garners

cloudy symbols

faery power

nothingness

These quatrains also unleash inexorable transitory strictures of foreclosure, feeding into the “nothingness” of the closing couplet in which death renders all human dreams, whether of love or fame, insignificant.

Increasing transitoriness:

autumn

one night

one hour

The poem’s imagery is likewise supportive of the theme, with an imagery cluster featuring darkness, shadows and clouds,

For the poet, death represents closure on love and artistry and fame. I remember reading one of Keats’s letters in which he called death “the great divorcer.”

The truth is that ultimately we all get our ticket punched; but for Keats, he was so young, talented, and in love. Sometimes life can be cruelly unfair. Nonetheless, with the quiet courage that always characterized him, he accepted his fate.

There are lessons here for all of us: to pile up the nows, knowing the temporality that governs us all; to live quietly and simply, centered in the right values; to discern those issues that matter; above all, to love amply those around us.

–rj

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