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?