Monday
My son recently alerted me to a heart-rending post by Dalhousie University English professor Rohan Maitzen, who on Thursday lost her son Owen to suicide. He sounds like he was a wonderful young man, intelligent, loving and creative. Unfortunately, crippling depression overrode everything else. I report on the case because of the following passage:
Inevitably, fragments of poems have been coming to me ever since he left us. Stop all the clocks. Remember me when I am gone away. Smart lad, to slip betimes away. Farewell thou child of my right hand and joy. They mean everything and nothing when it’s your own loss. Right now, the line I keep returning to is “Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d.” My love and my grief feel boundless right now; they are the same. I want to remember him with happiness. I really do think that’s what he wanted. It is such grace that he left us feeling love and loved.
I can’t say enough how much I relate. When my eldest son died in a freak drowning accident 21 years ago, my mind visited all these poems. At such moments, we flail around, grabbing at whatever can sustain us. Scraps of poetry function as life buoys when the horror threatens to overwhelm.
You may recognize the poems but, if not, here they are:
W. H. Auden, “Stop All the Clocks”
Christina Rossetti, “Remember”
A. E. Housman, “To an Athlete Dying Young”
Ben Jonson, “On My First Son”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, Section I
I also understand what Maitzen means about the poems meaning “everything and nothing.” On the one hand, words are inadequate and we feel their full inadequacy. But they are also all that we have. As Tennyson puts it in Section V,
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold;
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.
In my own case, I remember waking up at 2 am following the death and, unable to fall back to sleep, repeating over and over a line from Mary Oliver’s “Lost Children”: “Pain picked him up and held him in her gray jaw.” At the time, I didn’t recall that the line describes a man looking frantically for his missing daughter. I was just grateful that someone seemed to understand what I was going through, that I wasn’t alone in my grief. Poets have been speaking to suffering parents since the dawn of time, and somehow seeing myself in that long line made things a little more bearable. The pain didn’t go away, of course, but for a moment I was able to step outside it.
For several months following Justin’s death, I became obsessed with Tennyson’s In Memoriam, including the line that Maitzen mentions: “Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d.” Each day, when I returned home from the college, I would randomly open my copy of the poem and read two or three pages. I could understand why the poem helped Queen Victoria survive the death of her Prince Albert. The ups and downs that Tennyson goes through following the death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam—he composed the poem over a 17-year period—are what many people experience.
In her autobiography, novelist Jeanette Winterson has this to say about poetry:
[W]hen people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it’s irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.
I discovered this after Justin died and now Rohan Maitzen—God bless her—is discovering it.