Forever, never growing older, never growing
Old, forever the perfectly beautiful, perfectly
Trusting child forever and ever the way I say
Sometimes I want to stop time and have a moment
Last forever, never changing, knowing it
Impossible, knowing it cannot but
Knowing now with you it is possible, you will not
Ever change and knowing finally
That is the sorrow
The true sorrow
Of death.
Mary Ann Hoberman
I wrote this poem shortly after the death of my four-year-old grandson. At the time I did not think of it as a poem but as an outpouring of grief, written in a few minutes. It was only much later when I reread it and heard it as a poem that I copied it over with the line breaks and punctuation you see above.
FEAR OF DEATH
What is it now with me
And is it as I have become?
Is there no state free from the boundary lines
Of before and after? The window is open today
And the air pours in with piano notes
In its skirts, as though to say, “Look, John,
I’ve brought along these and these”—that is,
A few Beethovens, some Brahmses,
A few choice Poulenc notes.… Yes,
It is being free again, the air, it has to keep coming back
Because that’s all it’s good for.
I want to stay with it out of fear
That keeps me from walking up certain steps,
Knocking at certain doors, fear of growing old
Alone, and of finding no one at the evening end
Of the path except another myself
Nodding a curt greeting: “Well, you’ve been awhile
But now we’re back together, which is what counts.”
Air in my path, you could shorten this,
But the breeze has dropped, and silence is the last word.
John Ashbery
Ashbery’s poems are often somewhat enigmatic, and this one is no exception; but at the same time he confronts the primal fear of death head-on. Music may temper this fear but only briefly. The poem ends paradoxically in true Ashbery style: “silence is the last word.”
AUBADE
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blue, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things will never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
Philip Larkin
An aubade is a poem or song of morning, welcoming or lamenting the dawn of day. Larkin’s aubade is very definitely the latter. Here he goes through the litany of ways humanity has tried to obliterate the terror of eternal emptiness, all to no avail. But life must go on: “work has to be done,” exemplified by the dependable postman and the healing doctor, making their daily rounds.
AS BEFITS A MAN
I don’t mind dying—
But I’d hate to die all alone!
I want a dozen pretty women
To holler, cry, and moan!
I don’t mind dying
But I want my funeral to be fine:
A row of long tall mamas
Fainting, fanning, and crying.
I want a fish-tail hearse
And sixteen fish-tail cars,
A big brass band
And a whole truck load of flowers.
When they let me down,
Down into the clay,
I want the women to holler:
Please don’t take him away!
Ow-ooo-oo-o!
Don’t take daddy away!
Langston Hughes
This poem acts as an antidote to the preceding two. Here is the poet’s exuberant notion of a right and proper funeral. It recalls the New Orleans second line jazz funerals with their unstoppable celebration of life.
STAR SYSTEM
The stars in their magnificent array
Look down upon the Earth, their cynosure,
Or so it seems. They are too far away,
In fact, to see a thing; hence they look pure
To us. They lack the textures of our globe,
So only we, from cameras carried high,
Enjoy the beauty of the swirling robe
That wraps us up, the interplay of sky
And cloud, as if a Wedgwood plate of blue
And white should melt, and then, its surface stirred
With spoons, a treasure too good to be true,
Be placed, and hover like a hummingbird,
Drawing all eyes, though ours alone, to feast
On splendor as it turns west from the East.
There was a time when some of our young men
Walked plumply on the moon and saw Earth rise,
As stunning as the sun. The years since then
Have aged them. Now and then somebody dies.
It’s like a clock, for those of us who saw
The Saturn rockets going up as if
Mankind had energy to burn. The law is
Is different for one man. Time is a cliff
You come to in the dark. Though you might fall
As easily as on a feather bed,
It is a sad farewell. You loved it all.
You dream that you might keep it in your head.
But memories, where can you take them to?
Take one last look at them. They end with you.
And still the Earth revolves, and still the blaze
Of stars ma
intains a show of vigilance.
It should, for long ago, in olden days,
We came from there. By luck, by fate, by chance,
All of the elements that form the world
Were sent by cataclysms deep in space,
And from their combination life unfurled
And stood up straight, and wore a human face.
I still can’t pass a mirror. Like a boy,
I check my looks, and now I see the shell
Of what I was. So why, then, this strange joy?
Perhaps an old man dying would do well
To smile as he rejoins the cosmic dust
Life comes from, for resign himself he must.
Clive James
THE SNOW MAN
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees encrusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens
INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY
Something that has no existence is absent here
and that absence is louder than any sound.
You have been hearing it all your life
and will hear it
till it grows so faint it overwhelms everything—
as a summer cloud
no bigger than your hand
will blot out the sunset that was never really there.
John Hall Wheelock
The title of this poem is a play on the title of William Wordsworth’s famous poem “Intimations of Immortality.” In that poem Wordsworth looks back on his childhood; here Wheelock looks forward toward his death. The poem keeps contradicting itself in its attempts to express the inexpressible: the ineffable nature of death.
OLD AGE
In me is a little painted square
Bordered by old shops with gaudy awnings.
And before the shops sit smoking, open-bloused old men,
Drinking sunlight.
The old men are my thoughts;
And I come to them each evening, in a creaking cart,
And quietly unload supplies.
We fill slim pipes and chat
And inhale scents from pale flowers in the center of the square.…
Strong men, tinkling women, and dripping, squealing children
Stroll past us, or into the shops.
They greet the shopkeepers and touch their hats or foreheads to me.…
Some evening I shall not return to my people.
Maxwell Bodenheim
This tender picture of old age and its peaceful ending belies the tragic later life and death of Bodenheim. The fact that he could write such a poem, when in reality for much of his life he was homeless and penniless, makes it all the more touching.
FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEATH
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what
W. S. Merwin
THE COSSACKS
for F.
For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming.
Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm
is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate
New Year’s Eve by counting
my annual dead.
My mother, when she was dying,
spoke to her visitors of books
and travel, displaying serenity
as a form of manners, though
I could tell the difference.
But when I watched you planning
for a life you knew
you’d never have, I couldn’t explain
your genuine smile in the face
of disaster. Was it denial
laced with acceptance? Or was it
generations of being English—
Brontë’s Lucy in Villette
living as if no fire raged
beneath her dun-colored dress.
I want to live the way you did,
preparing for next year’s famine with wine
and music as if it were a ten-course banquet.
But listen: those are hoofbeats
on the frosty autumn air.
Linda Pastan
The Cossacks were Russian military groups who led the vicious anti-Jewish pogroms that took place during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Pastan’s poem they are equated with death.
A CONTRIBUTION TO STATISTICS
Out of a hundred people
those who always know better
—fifty-two
doubting every step
—nearly all the rest,
glad to lend a hand
if it doesn’t take too long
—as high as forty-nine,
always good
because they can’t be otherwise
—four, well maybe five,
able to admire without envy
—eighteen,
suffering illusions
induced by fleeting youth
—sixty, give or take a few,
not to be taken lightly
—forty and four,
living in constant fear
of someone or something
—seventy-seven,
capable of happiness
—twenty-something tops,
harmless singly, savage in crowds
—half at least,
cruel
when forced by circumstances
—better not to know
even ballpark figures,
wise after the fact
—just a couple more
than wise before it,
taking only things from life
—thirty
(I wish I were wrong),
hunched in pain,
no flashlight in the dark
—eighty-three
sooner or later,
righteous
—thirty-five, which is a lot,
righteous
and understanding
—three,
worthy of compassion
—ninety-nine
mortal
—a hundred out of a hundred.
Thus far this figure still remains unchanged.
Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish byStanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
Here statistics are a jumping-off platform for what appears at first to be a rather playful assessment of our lives but soon morphs into something else. Each stanza of the poem relies on actual statistics, compiled by the author herself in a survey of one hundred people.
IN THE BORDERLANDS
The part of this being that is rock,
the part of this body that is star,
lately I feel them yearning to go back
and be what they are.
As we get closer to the border
they whisper sometimes to my soul:
So long we’ve been away from order,
O when will we be whole?
Soon enough,
my soul replies,
you’ll shine in star and sleep in stone,
when I who troubled you a while with eyes
and grief and wakefulness am gone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The idea that we are part of this universe before as well as after our individual incarnations is a definition of eternal life not encompassed by most Western theologies.
7
“YES, THAT WAS I”
Old age may surprise us. If it is not Robert Browning’s romanticized “Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be,” neither is it merely the last station stop before oblivion. Like all that has gone before, it has its own distinct flavor, not to be known until actually tasted.
The edifice of old age is built on all that has come before, transformed into memories. These touchstones inform and enrich the present; indeed, they are what make us who we are. It is probably no accident that as we grow older we spend more time looking back on our pasts, trying to connect who we were with who we have become. We may once again take up some of the interests and pleasures of our youth. All of this seems to be a knitting together of past and present, a consolidation of all we have experienced.
In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot quoted someone who said to him, “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” And Eliot responded, “Precisely, and they are what we know.” Likewise we—our former selves—are what we know. Our own pasts are the elements out of which we construct our present selves, who will continue to evolve into our future selves until the very end.
I BEGIN TO LOVE
I begin to love the beauty
of the old more than the beauty of
the young—the old lady shielding
her face from the hot sun with a black
lacy fan and the exquisite
old man with the white beard and the old man pushing
the cart of the young man dying
of dystrophy & the elderly
woman in black holding the hand of a little
child in an apricot smock.
Hilda Morley
THAT WAS I
I was that older man you saw sitting
in a confetti of yellow light and falling leaves
on a bench at the empty horseshoe courts
in Thayer, Nebraska—brown jacket, soft cap,
wiping my glasses. I had noticed, of course,