Poetry in the Face of Death

Pieter Bruegel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558

Because of my concerns over my friend Alan and his cancer, I will spend another week looking at the role that poetry can play as we confront death and dying. Today’s entry describes how poetry made its way into my life following the death of my son Justin, described in last week’s opening entry (May 11). First of all, there was the night of his death. After going to bed late, I awoke around 2 a.m., staring straight at the horror of it all and unable to go back to sleep. My mind churned around and around. Finally, it latched on to two lines from the Mary Oliver poem “The Lost Children,” which I proceeded to repeat, over and over again, for the rest of the night. The earlier line refers to a father who has lost his daughter and is frantically searching for her: “Pain held him in its grey jaw.” The second line has the poet describing such moments of heartbreak: “when loss leans like a broken tree.”

Only later did I realize that the poem from which I had plucked the passages was about parents who have lost their children. At the time, the lines simply gave me something to hold on to, a stab at articulation of that which can’t be spoken. I felt gripped by the grey jaws of pain, the image of greyness capturing the colorless limbo I felt I had entered. The broken tree, meanwhile, captured my feelings of brokenness. I could imagine neither color nor growth nor vibrancy in my life ever again. But I found a kind of consolation that a poet seemed to have understood what I was going through. Although rationally I knew that people had been experiencing my sorrow back to the dawn of humankind, these words assured me in a deeper way that I had company.

People sent poems in the following days. Some were Hallmark card poems, which I couldn’t bear although I appreciated that people were trying to find ways to express their care for us. One colleague sent me W. H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” about a Breughel painting (Landscape and The Fall of Icarus, above) and the insensitivity of humans to the suffering of others. The painting shows an Icarus who has flown too close to the sun, which has melted the wax in his wings so that he is plunging into the water. But the tragedy occurs in the bottom corner of the painting, almost hidden, and the world either doesn’t notice or does but doesn’t take seriously the cataclysm that is going on in another’s life.

I’ve posted Auden’s poem in its entirety at the end of the entry. Here’s the relevant passage for my present purposes:

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I found myself thinking about that poem and why my friend sent it. Looking back, I think an Auden poem that would have addressed my condition more effectively would have been “Stop the Clocks,” which I will talk about later this week. I myself didn’t identify with the drama described by Breughel’s painting or Auden’s poem. I didn’t feel that people were like the ship sailing calmly by as Icarus crashes into the ocean, or like the shepherd looking on unconcerned. In fact, our friends were offering us an overflowing of love and concern. Food came pouring in, as though the community wanted to nourish us. People mowed our lawn, cleaned our house, manned the phones, gave us books and flowers, set up memorial services, visited and told stories about Justin, and on and on. Of course they returned to their regular lives far more quickly that Julia and I did. It was finals week, they had tests to give and papers to grade, I expected nothing else.

But as I’ve thought about the poem since, I think my colleague was expressing something else. I think, whether he knew it consciously or not, he was saying through his gift of the poem, “I can’t imagine what you are going through and I can’t suffer as you are suffering. Therefore I must appear to you like a ship sailing calmly on. But I want you to know that I do care.”

The fear of not being up to the occasion, the fear of doing or saying the wrong thing, is common in the face of death, I think. What I determined early on, even before I thought about the Auden poem, is that the awkwardness that people felt in the face of my sorrow was evidence of their concern. When people ducked behind bushes when they saw me coming (as a couple did), when they stumbled over words in my presence—all of that I interpreted as their desire to do and say more and their fear that they would hurt me because they couldn’t. I felt their love in each case.

We turn to poetry when people die because it comes as close as language ever does to expressing what cannot be expressed. The poems that people sent us, the poems that I turned to, were feeble attempts at getting language to live up to the moment. While language is never adequate, language is all we have, and poetry, which hints at realities beyond the literal, is language giving us its best shot.

Addendum: When I talked with my friend Alan last night and told him about my interpretation of my colleague’s selection of Auden’s poem, he suggested a much simpler reading: that my colleague was aware of how alone we can feel in our suffering and was sending me the poem to let me know that, if I were feeling this way, both Breugel and Auden had been there before me and understood the pain.  That interpretation, I must admit, is more plausible.  But the other was more consoling.   So in preferring my own, I feel a bit like the detective in the Borges short story “Death and the Compass” who turns his back on the obvious solution to a crime in favor of a much more elaborate one.   He’s more drawn to the more interesting hypothesis than in the hypothesis that turns out to be the truth.

Musee des Beaux Arts

By W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, 
Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden.