Refusal to Mourn? Just the Opposite

By Robin Bates | Published: January 9, 2022
Firemen administer to a victim of Sunday’s Bronx fire

Monday

Because there were nine children among the 19 people who died in yesterday’s horrific Bronx fire, Dylan Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” came to mind. I’ve written about the poem before but I’m repurposing that post to apply to the tragedy.

The conflagration appears to have been caused by a malfunctioning space heater, and the fire is being described as one of the worst in the city’s history. Another 12 inhabitants are still in area hospitals, with 63 having been injured in all.

As Thomas intends, readers are initially horrified by the sentiment expressed in the poem’s title. The poet uses this strategy to get us to focus on the victim.

That’s because normally, when we hear of a tragedy, we fit it into a recognizable category. In doing so, we remove some of the sting, but in the process we also distance ourselves from it. While not exactly dehumanizing the victims, we check a kind of mourning box and then move on.

At the risk of appearing heartless, the poet rejects this approach. He wants us to rethink our conventional responses to how we react to “the majesty and burning of the child’s death”:

I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Keep in mind that Thomas is referring to a tragedy that dwarfs the Bronx fire tragedy. Almost 40,000 Londoners were killed by the London Blitz during World War II, with another 50,000 seriously injured. One of these was the girl mentioned in the poem, who comes to stand in for everyone.

How does “a grave truth” murder “the mankind of her going”? Perhaps fatalistically pointing out that we will all inevitably encounter the truth of the grave diminishes the death. So does a conventional elegy, which is sure to mention her innocence and youth. As we read the poem, we find ourselves struggling to put into words what is beyond words.

The poem’s final line also resists comfortable containment as it can be read two ways. Does “After the first death, there is no other” refer to Christianity’s vision of eternal life? Christian language can be found throughout the poem, including in the “stations of the breath” (cross) that we use to articulate our grief. Or does it express atheism’s belief that when we die, we just die?

The opening stanzas don’t make it any clearer. With images of our making and our final silence, Thomas could be referring to the Book of Genesis and Revelation. But maybe not. In any event, our own momentous life cycle—momentous at least to us—is just as momentous for this girl.

Despite the title, I sense that both the child and all who died along with her are indeed mourned. I find something comforting in her being with those who have gone before, as well as with nature in its eternal cycle. The Thames may not mourn, but we do. As with other great elegies (I think especially of Shelley’s Adonais, where he mourns Keats), we watch the poet struggle with meaninglessness. As with other great elegies, this one doesn’t allow this unnamed girl to slip easily from memory once we have put in the requisite mourning.

As I say, Thomas’s poem gets me to think more fully about all those who have died in the Bronx fire.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Burning, of a Child in London
By Dylan Thomas

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

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Fable of the Third Christmas Camel

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2022
Tissot, The Magi Journeying

Spiritual Sunday – First Sunday in Epiphany

I repost today an Epiphany poem by my father, one of my favorites, along with my previous notes on it. Epiphany is when Christians celebrate the entry into the world of the radical new idea that love is more powerful than death. To call the idea counterintuitive is a spectacular understatement. Fear can rule our lives, which is why we need constant prayer and worship to rekindle our faith. The notion that love can trump death didn’t originate with Jesus, but he embodied it so powerfully that it caught on.

Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar, the three wise men, stand in for the greater world. They also represent mystical wisdom. Perhaps we could say that the shepherds who came to see the infant Jesus have the simple faith of the heart whereas the magi have the higher wisdom of the head. (This is how Auden sees it in a poem I have posted on in the past.) Neither is complete without the other.

In the past I have written about T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” where one of the kings recalls the moment, years ago, when he saw the Christ child. He remembers that the journey to Bethlehem was hard but worth the suffering. Since that time the vision has clouded over, and he is “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods.”

Today’s poem, considerably lighter, takes the vantage point of one of the camels. Rather than lamenting the loss of belief (a nonstop Eliot theme that eventually becomes tiresome), the poem tells us to be good community citizens. Regardless of where we live and what we do, we can live in love and service. That, the camel tells us, is how Christ’s love manifests itself in the world.

There is an implied criticism in the poem of the kings for not having stuck it out with the Christ child–that’s why the camel has to slip away–so perhaps the poem does echo Eliot’s. We once were in touch with divinity before returning to our normal lives.

Then again, as I said, we all of us lose the vision and must rediscover it. Again and again.

You’ll probably recognize the Biblical allusion in the final stanza but, in case you don’t, it’s Jesus’ assertion (Matthew 19:24) that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.” “Effendi” is Arabic for “Master.”

Here’s the poem:

Fable of the Third Christmas Camel
By Scott Bates

(Editor’s note: The following poetic fragment, evidently an overlooked scrap of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was recently discovered near Jerusalem, stuck to the bottom of an empty bagel can. We offer here an approximate translation into modern English of this invaluable historical document.)

I went all the way
But on the return trip
I gave the caravan
The slip

One desert night
Quit Balthazar
With all his frankincense
And myrrh

And headed out
Across the sand
It was dawn when I came
To this strange land

And found this family
Living here
Without a camel
Because they were poor

So I stayed with them
Carried their hides
Gave all the kids
Free camel rides

Sat with the baby
Worked with the man
Sang them ballads
Of Ispahan

Carried the water
Pulled the plow
Loved my neighbor
Who was a cow

I like it here
I’m staying with them
As I wanted to stay
In Bethlehem

With that other
Family I knew
Which proves Effendi
That passing through

The eye of a needle
Is an easier thing
For a camel
Than a king

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Satan’s Attempt to “Own” God

By Robin Bates | Published: January 6, 2022
Stanhope, The Temptation of Eve

Friday

Yesterday, in my comparing January 6 with Satan’s rebellion in Paradise Lost, I concluded by contending that Satan adopts an “own the libs” approach to fighting God. I elaborate on that today.

Right now, the GOP (with the exception of a few governors and local officials) has basically relinquished the responsibility of governing to the Democrats. The logical follow-up is that, once one does that, one basically devolves to a teenager taking shots at one’s parents. One scores points if one gets them angry. They may think they’re superior but, if one unhinges them, then one shows who is boss.

That’s the strategy that Satan comes up with in Book II. Banished to hell, his angels debate on what to do next, the three proposals being (1) fight God again, (2) lie low and hope God forgets about them and (3) build their own counter kingdom in Hell. The first of the options is hopeless, however, and the second and third fail to satisfy Satan’s thirst for revenge. He therefore has second-in-command Beelzebub provide a fourth option: Satan will seek out God’s new creation (humans) and corrupt them. The satisfaction he and his fellow devil will get from this is (wait for it!) God’s joy will be interrupted and the fallen angels can rejoice at having disturbed Him. That’ll teach Him!

Beelzebub explains the effects as follows:

                                           This would surpass 
Common revenge, and interrupt his joy
In our confusion, and our joy upraise
In his disturbance…

For perspective, let’s remind ourselves what the angels have given up by rebelling against God. First, they no longer experience “beatitude past utterance”:

About [God] all the sanctities [holy beings] of Heaven
Stood thick as stars, and from his sight receiv’d
Beatitude past utterance…

Later, we see the good angels experiencing a deep joy as their beings are filled with God’s “ambrosial fragrance.” And then there’s the singing:

                     their gold’n harps they took,
Harps ever tun’d, that glittering by their side
Like Quivers hung, and with preamble sweet
Of charming symphony they introduce
Their sacred Song, and waken raptures high;
No voice exempt, no voice but well could join
Melodious part, such concord is in Heav’n.

Satan, by contrast, offers his followers a different kind of intoxication: they get to feel wronged and then to salve their wounds by hurting someone else. Sadism provides its own kind of satisfaction, as Satan reveals in a later book:

For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts.

For Satan’s forces to repent and return to God, they would have to admit that they were wrong to follow him in the first place—and to admit having made a mistake is a blow to the ego. They’d rather suffer and then assuage their suffering with the pain of another rather that give themselves over to goodness.

In our case, goodness would be committing oneself to the Constitution. I suspect that Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republicans who have joined with Democrats to investigate January 6 and who have consequently been exiled by the GOP, are more at peace than those who continue to grovel at Trump’s feet.

As a reward for their groveling, however, the ex-president provides them various sadistic thrills. So there’s that.

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Milton’s Satan and the Jan 6 Insurrection

By Robin Bates | Published: January 5, 2022
Gustave Doré, Paradise Lost, Battle in Heaven

Thursday – Anniversary of Capitol Insurrection

My faculty discussion group is discovering that it’s an eye-popping experience to be discussing Paradise Lost on the anniversary of the Capitol insurrection—which is to say, when Donald Trump sicced rioters on Congress to pressure Vice President Mike Pence and Republican members of Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. I’m writing a two-part essay on the parallels. In today’s post, I look at the ringleaders, in tomorrow’s the followers.

I’ve written in the past about how Milton’s depiction of Satan function is a study of narcissism, which it why Satan-Trump comparisons are so apt. Rereading Books I and II, however, have revealed more comparisons than I had realized. For instance, Satan has the same love of outward show that Trump does. Think of the gold-gilded palace that the fallen angels build in Hell as his version of Trump Tower.

Like Trump, Satan and the angel Mammon have a thing for gold. We learn that there’s plenty of gold in Hell, which Milton informs us is the proper place for it:

            [W]ith impious hands [Hell’s angels]
Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth
For Treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the Hill a spacious wound
And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire 
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.

Out of these so-called riches of the earth emerges a palace, designed by the angel Mulciber. Think of him as the Satanic version of Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. Or, for that matter, whoever Trump’s architect is:

Anon out of the earth a fabric huge
Rose like an Exhalation, with the sound
Of Dulcet Symphonies and voices sweet,
Built like a Temple, where pilasters round
Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid
With golden architrave; nor did there want 
Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures grav’n,
The Roof was fretted gold. Not Babylon fretted gold.
Nor great Alcairo [Cairo] such magnificence
Equal’d in all their glories…

In this hall, Satan presides over what he claims is a parliament but which is democratic in name only since, from the first, the fix is in. Satan knows exactly what result he wants to get from the proceedings.

Sewanee’s very smart Renaissance specialist Ross McDonald, who is leading our discussion of Milton, pointed out the gyrations Satan goes through to retain his leadership position. If he contradicts himself, well, when have autocrats ever been consistent? Their goal is to remain in power, and they will say whatever is necessary to achieve that end.

It is a natural fact, Satan tells the fallen angels, that I am your leader, although he then says that it is a matter of free choice that we should aspire to things higher. Rationalizing the fact that his leadership has ruined their lives, he assures his troops that, though they fell, their defeat will only make their future glory that much greater. Furthermore, he claims that he is to be admired because taking leadership is a heroic sacrifice as he will be the most likely angel to capture God’s attention.

Earlier Satan has come up with an elaborate defense for his defeat. Since there’s no way our magnificent fighting force could have lost, he tells his angels, God must have been hiding his full strength from us. Who could have known God would trick us in this way? So it’s God’s fault, not mine, that we were lured into the hopeless rebellion.

The contorted logic reminds me of a rightwing commentator for Breitbart, John Nolte, who argued that the organized left uses reverse psychology to trick people into refusing the “Trump vaccine,” thereby killing them off. So it’s actually the left’s fault, not that of right’s political and thought leaders, for the covid debacle.

In Milton’s parliamentary session, we hear from various angels who have their equivalents in our own situation. The parallel isn’t exact, of course, since Satan has lost whereas, on January 6, Trump was still in the White House. But just as there was General Michael Flynn, who wanted Trump to invoke the insurrection act, and Steve Bannon, who was consorting with the Proud Boys and wanted outright confrontation, in Paradise Lost we have the angel Moloch. “My sentence,” he thunders, “is for open war: Of wiles, more unexpert, I boast not.”

Apparently one cause of contention amongst Trump coup plotters was whether to be openly confrontational or more subtle. Figures like Peter Navarro and Roger Stone, apparently, thought the attack on the Capitol actually undermined their plan to send election certification back to the state legislatures. Sneaky chicanery, on the other hand, might have worked.

Of course, just as Satan’s rebellion is doomed to fail, so, in the eyes of establishment Republicans, were Trump’s efforts. Rather than break with Trump and stand with the Constitution, however, most in the GOP have behaved like smooth-talking Belial.

Even while he claims to hate God just as much as Moloch does, Belial is a realist. Satan and the angels, he says, would have no chance in another battle. (If he were to say they have a snowball’s chance in Hell, he would be speaking from firsthand experience.) His counsel, therefore, is to lay low and hope that God forgets about them–which is what most Republicans want the public to do about the events of January 6. For that matter, most Republicans hope to escape Trump’s attention as well:

I think of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham when I see Belial described:

On th’ other side up rose
Belial, in act more graceful and humane;
A fairer person lost not Heav’n; he seemed 
For dignity composed and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his tongue
Dropped manna and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low; 
To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds
Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas’d the ear,
And with persuasive accent thus began.

Most GOP members are not necessarily this persuasive, but they are just as callously pragmatic. If the party can’t win without Trump, Graham said at one point, then Trump it is, whatever one thinks of him. Milton sums up Belial as follows:

Thus Belial with words clothed in reason’s garb
Counseled ignoble ease, and peaceful sloth,
Not peace…

Satan wants neither of these options, however. Knowing that he can’t beat God in open warfare but rejecting inaction because it doesn’t feed his desire for revenge, he chooses instead to irritate God. In other words, to use current parlance, he wants to own the libs. I’ll discuss this further in tomorrow’s post.

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Wanted: An Elegy to Mourn Covid Victims

By Robin Bates | Published: January 4, 2022
Jules Charles Boquet, Mourners

Wednesday

In these days of Covid horror when over 800,000 Americans have died—a number impossible for the mind to grasp—a couple of Washington Post writers are telling us that we need poetic elegies. After asking “what cultural forms and expressive practices can bear these absent lives with us into the future?” David Sherman and Karen Elizabeth Bishop make a case for this ancient poetic genre:

Elegy is where we figure out how to do this work. Elegiac poetry helps us hold vigil over the dying and bear the dead to a resting place. The form has long offered symbolic versions of these defining human acts, surrogate ways to fulfill existential obligations when we are rendered passive and mute by another’s death.

The writers mention Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”—they could also have mentioned his “O Captain, My Captain”—and note how the poet grapples with unanswerable questions. “O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? / And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?” the poet asks in the first of the poems. Sherman and Bishop observe,

Whitman wrote these lines fora slain president and a nation devastated by civil war. In a pandemic, when a flood of statistics threatens to swallow the singularity of every death, contemporary elegies — about the dead, for the dead, in place of the dead — offer us new ways for our grief to work its way past silence. Elegy performs an essential caretaking, both intimate and public, of our dead. Poetry is a labor of survival.

They then turn to a poem that poet Nick Laird wrote about his father when, cut off from family, he was dying in a hospital. I recommend reading the poem in its entirety—you can find it here–but below are some of the key passages:

… This morning
the consultant said your father now is clawing
at the mask and is exhausted and we’ve thrown
everything we have at this. It’s a terrible disease.

And:

On Sunday they permitted us to Zoom
and he was prone in a hospital gown
strapped to a white slab.
The hospital gown split at the back
and the pale cold skin of his back was exposed.

He lifted his head to the camera
and his face was all red, swollen,
bisected vertically by the mask,
and we had to ask Elizabeth the nurse
to say his words back to us –
he sounded underwater –
it’s been a busy day but not a good day.

And:

When I phoned the hospital this afternoon
to say goodbye, though you were no longer lucid,

Elizabeth the nurse held the phone against your ear
and I could hear your breathing, or perhaps the rasping

of the oxygen machine, and I said what you’d expect.
I love you, Dad, and I want you to keep on fighting,

but if you are too tired now, and in too much pain,
then you should stop fighting, and let go, and whatever

happens it’s okay. I love you. You were a good father.
The kids love you. Thank you for everything.

Then I hung up. And scene. Impossible to grieve
and not know the vanity of grief. To watch one

self perform the rituals that take us. Automaton
of grief, I howled, of course, by myself

in my office, then sobbed for a bit on the sofa.

The poet then has some words about the significance of elegies:

An elegy I think is words to bind a grief

in, a companionship of grief, a spell
to keep it safe and sound, to keep it

from escaping.

Sherman and Bishop observe that, because covid makes touch impossible, Laird

labors to make sure his father is seen and his death de-sequestered. The poem struggles with how to be present from a distance, how to witness the ravages of the pandemic from the inside out. In this final gift of elegy, his father is isolated, but not alone, as he drifts into death’s cold waters.

Elegies, the writers note, are often addressed to the one who has died, “as if they might help us make sense of their absence and our own, now uncanny, survival.” But they add that the form of address is meant for others to overhear. We “inhabit this space alongside the poet,” they point out, meeting in “a fertile borderland between being and nonbeing, or a time zone between is and was.” Later in the piece they say that elegiac language “is a territory that the living and dead inhabit together.”

Unlike the death of Lincoln or Laird’s father, covid presents a special challenge since it involves mass death. Whitman spoke to a grieving nation and Laird attempts to sort out his own individual grieving, but how speak of mass death?  Sherman and Bishop point out one way when they cite South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon (trans. Don Mee Choi) attempting to pen a response to the hundreds of school children who died in the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster. The poet, they report,

hallucinates impossible rites of commemoration: “a four-ton bronze bell with a thousand names of the dead engraved on it dangles from the helicopter / The helicopter flies over a tall mountain to hang the bell at a temple hidden deep in the mountains,” or “A thousand masks float on the thousand rivers of the north, south, east, west.”

As a result, Hyesoon’s imagination

inscribes the sky, water and land with their absence, remaking and remapping the world in their wake. Her poetry teaches us about the combination of imagination and courage we need to create commemorative spaces for the millions who have died, and are dying, of covid.

While elegy cannot, of course, change the fact of death,

somehow we are stronger in both knowing that the terms of death are nonnegotiable and still insisting, on the page and in our voice, on negotiation. … Poetry helps us gather the remains of the dead, even across great distance, and offer them a place.

This was certainly true in my case. After I lost my son, I rummaged through a number of the world’s great elegies, such as Lycidas and In Memoriam, before settling on a passage from Percy Shelley’s Adonais to post on Justin’s gravestone. The poem is Shelley’s elegy to the poet John Keats. Here’s the passage I chose:

He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…

The Washington Post authors are right: elegies have an immense power to address our grief. Some of the craziness that we are seeing in America right now might stem from the covid pandemic. Will a poet arise from the ranks and help us collectively mourn our covid dead the way Whitman helped the nation mourn for Lincoln?

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Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 3, 2022

Tuesday

Sewanee experienced its first snow of the year yesterday, taking me back to memories of Sewanee snowfalls in the 1950s. While the six-inch snowfall is quite a lot for us, I was sure it was dwarfed by the snowfalls of my childhood. I found myself asking, with the great medieval French poet François Villon, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”

In the semi-autobiographical movie Amarcord, Federico Fellini depicts snow from his childhood that has piled up so deep that the townspeople must make their way through a system of tunnels. Again, memory has deepened the drifts. Dylan Thomas’s memory works similarly in A Child’s Christmas in Wales. As he notes in the opening paragraph, “I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.” The prose poem proceeds from there:

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero’s garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wise cats never appeared.

We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows – eternal, ever since Wednesday…

“Eternal, ever since Wednesday”—that pretty much sums up the tension between mythical memory and reality.

Thomas recounts his memory to a small boy, who has his own memories of past snowfalls. Thomas, feeling pressured to compete, insists that his snow was more spectacular:

But here a small boy says: “It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”

“But that was not the same snow,” I say. “Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.”

Thomas’s childhood snows expand to mythical proportions:

The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying “Excelsior.” We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay. 

For Thomas, the past is mystical and holy—and that is how the recollection ends:

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

I too, as I prepare to go to sleep tonight, will turn down the gas (yes, we have gas heat), crawl into bed, look out into the darkness, and fall asleep. Who knows where memory will take me then?

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Let Love Clasp Grief Lest Both Be Drown’d

By Robin Bates | Published: January 2, 2022
Michelangelo, Pieta

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.

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Night Is Past and Lo It Is Day

By Robin Bates | Published: January 1, 2022
Simon Vouet, Father Time Overcome by Love, Hope, and Beauty (1672)

Spiritual Sunday

To welcome in the new year, here’s a Christina Rossetti poem doing the same. At first, however, she’s more weary than glad. As she observes, the Old Year has left her tired—“Stripped of favorite things I had,/ Balked of much desired.” Yet she is prepared for the “somewhat sad” New Year to meet her, whether it brings her harm or grace, because her journey through time brings her closer to God.

Imagining herself as one of those who watch for God’s coming—as Jesus says in Matthew 24:42, “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come”—the poet imagines herself keeping vigil on the last night of the year. She also imagines angels watching with her and wondering why God is taking so long. Yet she is sure that today’s pain will give way to tomorrow’s delight. The lines remind me of a passage from the familiar hymn “The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord”:

Yet saints their watch are keeping,
their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
shall be the morn of song.

We’re not home free yet, however. The poem notes various ways in which the World, like the Old Year, passes away. For instance,

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:
With its burden of fear and hope, of labor and play;
Hearken what the past doth witness and say:
Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,
A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.

Then, however, we have Easter morning as Christ the bridegroom makes his appearance:

At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day
Lo the bridegroom shall come and shall not delay:
Watch thou and pray.
Then I answered: Yea.

Rossetti, seeing herself as the spouse, concludes with joyous images drawn from the following passage in Song of Solomon (2:10-13):

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Or as Rossetti puts it,

Passing away, saith my God, passing away:
Winter passeth after the long delay:
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.
Tho’ I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray.
Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day,
My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered: Yea.

Here’s the poem:

Old and New Year Ditties
By Christine Rossetti

               1.
New Year met me somewhat sad:
     Old Year leaves me tired,
Stripped of favorite things I had,
Balked of much desired:
     Yet farther on my road today
God willing, farther on my way.

New Year coming on apace
     What have you to give me?
Bring you scathe [harm], or bring you grace,
Face me with an honest face;
     You shall not deceive me:
Be it good or ill, be it what you will,
It needs shall help me on my road,
My rugged way to heaven, please God.

               2.
Watch with me, men, women, and children dear,
You whom I love, for whom I hope and fear,
Watch with me this last vigil of the year.
Some hug their business, some their pleasure scheme;
Some seize the vacant hour to sleep or dream;
Heart locked in heart some kneel and watch apart.

Watch with me, blessed spirits, who delight
All thro’ the holy night to walk in white,
Or take your ease after the long-drawn fight.
I know not if they watch with me: I know
They count this eve of resurrection slow,
And cry, “How long?” with urgent utterance strong.

Watch with me, Jesus, in my loneliness:
Tho’ others say me nay, yet say Thou yes;
Tho’ others pass me by, stop Thou to bless.
Yea, Thou dost stop with me this vigil night;
Tonight of pain, tomorrow of delight:
I, Love, am Thine; Thou, Lord my God, art mine.

               3.
Passing away, saith the World, passing away:
Chances, beauty and youth sapped day by day:
Thy life never continueth in one stay.
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to gray
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?
I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:
Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay
On my bosom for aye.
Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:
With its burden of fear and hope, of labor and play;
Hearken what the past doth witness and say:
Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,
A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.
At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day
Lo the bridegroom shall come and shall not delay:
Watch thou and pray.
Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my God, passing away:
Winter passeth after the long delay:
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.
Tho’ I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray.
Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day,
My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered: Yea.

I am reminded of Helen Hunt Jackson’s “New Year Morning,” where she says every night should be treated as an occasion for “confession and resolve and prayer” and that very morning should be seen as a sacred awakening of renewed hope. It is her own way of keeping eternal watch:

All nights are sacred nights to make
Confession and resolve and prayer;
All days are sacred days to wake
New gladness in the sunny air.
Only a night from old to new;
Only a sleep from night to morn.
The new is but the old come true;
Each sunrise sees a new year born.

Let us all answer: Yea.

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Quiet Hopes for the New Year

By Robin Bates | Published: December 30, 2021
Robert Bruce Crane, The Fall Season

Friday – New Year’s Eve

W. S. Merwin has a lovely New Year’s Day poem, one that contrasts dramatically with, say, Tennyson’s “Ring out, wild bells” (from In Memoriam) in that Merwin’s new year enters quietly. “With what stillness at last you appear in the valley,” the poet observes, speaking to the new year. Later, after he hears the voice of a mourning dove calling plaintively, he remarks, “so this is the sound of you here and now whether or not anyone hears it.”

The poem seems to veer between a quiet melancholy and a quiet acceptance. Many years of experience have taught the aging poet to tamp down his New Year expectations. He is no longer convinced that accumulated knowledge will usher in great changes, and perhaps he thinks he no longer hopes. At any rate, whatever hopes he once entertained have become so evanescent as to be “invisible before us.” And yet, just because he can no longer see these hopes does not mean that they aren’t there. Because they are invisible, they are untouched and, because untouched, perhaps still possible.

To the New Year
By W. S. Merwin

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible

Further thought: The hush that Merwin mentions reminds me of a favorite episode in a favorite children’s book of mine, the early morning boat excursion in Wind in the Willows where Rat and Mole sense the presence of the great god Pan. The preternatural stillness presages something momentous, but they can’t grasp what:

Then a change began slowly to declare itself. The horizon became clearer, field and tree came more into sight, and somehow with a different look; the mystery began to drop away from them. A bird piped suddenly, and was still; and a light breeze sprang up and set the reeds and bulrushes rustling. Rat, who was in the stern of the boat, while Mole sculled, sat up suddenly and listened with a passionate intentness. Mole, who with gentle strokes was just keeping the boat moving while he scanned the banks with care, looked at him with curiosity.

“It’s gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worthwhile but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.

“Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.”

And yet another thought: I’ve only just realized that I reported on this poem once before. It was read at the memorial service for the 2010 victims of the Tucson, Arizona shooting along with the following Merwin observation:

Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened and elated moments. People turn to poetry in times of crisis because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said. In expressing the inexpressible poetry remains close to the origins of language.

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