"Ophelia" by Sir John Everette Millais
For today’s entry on poems that can come to our aid when we are confronting death, I will be looking at two. In both poems, the speaker has lost a loved one. One of them, which I have known and loved since high school and whose sentiments I agree with, now angers me. The other, which has sentiments I disagree with, I have found consoling. Thus they present interesting examples of the complex ways that poetry interacts with our lives.
Robert Burns wrote “Highland Mary” following the sudden death of his mistress Mary Campbell. I first encountered it when I was 13 and fell in love with its nature imagery. When I returned to it after my own experiences with death, however, I found myself infuriated with the consolation that Burns provides in the final stanza. Here’s the poem:
Ye banks and braes and streams around
The castle o’ Montgomery,
Green be your woods, and falr your flowers,
Your waters never drumlie!
There simmer first unfauld her robes,
And there the langest tarry;
For there I took the last fareweel
O’ my sweet Highland Mary.
How sweetly bloom’d the gay green birk,
How rich the hawthorn’s blossom,
As underneath their fragrant shade
I clasp’d her to my bosom!
The golden hours on angel wings
Flew o’er me and my dearie;
For dear to me as light and life
Was my sweet Highland Mary.
Wi’ mony a vow and lock’d embrace
Our parting was fu’ tender;
And pledging aft to meet again,
We tore oursels asunder;
But, oh fell Death’s untimely frost,
That nipt my flower sae early!
Now green’s the sod, and cauld’s the clay!
That wraps my Highland Mary!
O pale, pale now, those rosy lips
I aft hae kiss’d sae fondly!
And closed for ay the sparkling glance
That dwelt on me sae kindly;
And mouldering now in silent dust
That heart that lo’ed me dearly!
But still within my bosom’s core
Shall live my Highland Mary.
I appreciated when I was young, and still appreciate, the double edged aspect of nature in the poem: how love blooms like the hawthorn blossom, a green and growing force, and how humans return to nature when they die. “Now green’s the sod, and cauld’s the clay!/ That wraps my Highland Mary!” is a stark statement that comforts by its willingness not to call reality anything less than what it is. So far so good.
I also like the irony, which Breughel’s painting of Icarus (discussed in Tuesday’s entry) also captures: how human tragedy can occur at a time when life is blooming. I felt the full force of this irony when my 21-year-old son died on a perfect spring day. “But, oh fell Death’s untimely frost,/ That nipt my flower sae early!” Yes, that’s what happened.
So what angers me about the poem? The way that it shifts emotional gears in the last two lines. When the speaker asserts triumphantly, “But still within my bosom’s core/ Shall live my Highland Mary,” I feel that this consoling thought, which I don’t disagree with, comes too quickly and with too little work. It’s as though he’s more interested in being consoled than in mourning her. Yes, with time Mary will become a tender and loving memory. Yes, there is a sense in which our loved ones remain in existence because we remember them in our hearts. But not this fast.
The other poem is W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” often referred to as “Stop All the Clocks.” The poem is the one recited in the British film Four Weddings and a Funeral, to great effect. As I say, there are sentiments in it that I don’t agree with but which I needed when I was in my own mourning process. Here it is:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
“I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong”? I don’t agree. I think that love is stronger that death. “For nothing now can ever come to any good”? Good has come to me out of my son’s death, starting with an increased empathy for my students who are going through similar tragedies. I have been able to support them far more powerfully than I have in the past. “The stars are not wanted now”? The stars, the moon, the sun, the river in which Justin drowned, the woods that border our lawn—they all provided solace in the days following the death.
But if I don’t buy the argument, I buy the emotion. The despair that the poet feels is real, and it is therapeutic to hear it voiced. The shock of the statement about love gets at the blind rage against the turn the universe has taken. The extremity of the poem, which swings from a love that verges on idolatry to a loss of all belief, captures the frenzy of loss as well as any poem that I know.
Of course the poem is not the last word on the subject. It just signals to others that we don’t want to be consoled at this point. We don’t want to be told that it will get better. (In the early days, I didn’t want things to get better. I didn’t want the pain to go away.) Healing comes with time as grief and mourning take their course. In these two poems, Auden gets it, Burns doesn’t.
