The Poetry of Death

Every two months or so, I pick up one of my e.e. cummings collections. (I have two.) I can’t pretend to be a scholarly reader, but I do enjoy puzzling through his poems, reading the lines half-aloud as I look for his lyrical gems. Most of his poems aren’t stories, but sometimes, cummings shows a great knack for describing the human psyche/human heart. Which is why I (driven by my inner romantic self) keep this cycle.

This week, I encountered this poem:

to start,to hesitate;to stop
(kneeling in doubt:while all
skies fall)and then to slowly trust
T upon H,and smile

could anything be pleasanter
(some big dark little day
which seems a lifetime at the least)
except to add an A?

henceforth he feels his pride involved
(this i who’s also you)
and nothing less than excellent
E will exactly do

next(our great problem nearly solved)
we dare adorn the whole
with a distinct grandiloquent
deep D;while all skies fall

at last perfection,now and here
—but look:not sunlight?yes!
and(plunging rapturously up)
we spill our masterpiece

It’s not a difficult puzzle: the capital letters easily spell out the heart of the poem, which (to me, at least) is disappointingly simple. Yet, this poem isn’t merely about death; it’s actually quite the opposite. By spelling “death” backwards, cummings is really talking about life. And so we follow the letters, watching as a life is slowly constructed and ends only when the “grandiloquent deep D” is found and placed.

There’s something attractive about this picture. It seems to imply that every life has purpose because every death comes at the right time. And yet, there’s something odd about calling a life a “masterpiece.” A masterpiece by whom? For cummings, the glory belongs to the “liver” (the one who lives the life), not something else. And that sounds like a lie: I know no one who would be willing to call his or her life a masterpiece. Too many mistakes are made, too many faults consume us to honestly declare our handiwork masterful. Such things are absent from cummings’s poem. At the very least, there ought to be a mistake—maybe a misspelling that needs to be crossed out. His picture of life is too clean, too Kinkade-ish. Because really, how many lives truly end with a grandiloquent D?

Annie Dillard’s picture of death is, I think, more honest:

I think that the dying
pray at the last
not “please”
but “thank you”
as a guest thanks his host at the door.
Falling from mountains
the people are crying
thank you,
thank you,
all down the air;
and the cold carriages
draw up for them on the rocks.
– from “Tickets for a Prayer Wheel”

See, it’s not that death can’t be beautiful. On the contrary! There must be beauty. But at the same time, there must also be something dreadful (remember Auden?), something painful. Death can be a glorious end, but only if it’s a glorious beginning. And even then, the glorious end must be tainted with something painful, something uncomfortable, something akin to being impaled on razor-like rocks at the bottom of a cliff.

Blue Ice, On Sale

If any of you who read this blog regularly haven’t yet read or purchased Blue Ice, and Other Stories from the Rink—well, now is your best shot to grab one.

The publisher (Canon Press) is currently hosting a Fall sale where you can snag a copy of Blue Ice for a mere $5. There are also other worthwhile books for sale, so be sure to take a look around—perhaps something else will strike your fancy.

If you already have a copy, well done. But please share the link with anyone you know who might be interested in a collection of hockey stories at a bargain price.

The sale ends of November 8th.

Selected Notes of Interest

Selected notes of interest from Auden’s “Martyr as Dramatic Hero” (in Secondary Worlds).

[1] A quote:

For both the humanist and the poet, Socrates is the ideal martyr. The Crucifixion, on the other hand, can be neither humanized nor idealized. To attempt to poetize the dreadful facts is to falsify them. (page 20)

[2] Auden states that in his play Thomas Cranmer, Charles Williams was “primarily interested” in the “inner life” of his protagonist. But then he says this:

How is a man’s inner life to be made manifest on a stage? Not by dialogue, obviously, for when we speak to others, we seldom, if ever, tell them all that is in our minds. Nor by soliloquies: we are never fully conscious of what we feel and are doing; ignorance of ourselves and self-deceptions are necessary to life, for complete consciousness would render us incapable of doing anything at all. (pages 27-28)

He goes on to say that Williams invents a “Divine Agent” for his play, a character who is not fully visible to the characters within the play and yet not wholly divorced from the action either. Which is all well and good for Williams. But what’s a poor novelist to do? I think that Auden’s point is correct, but I also think there are other ways of revealing a character’s “inner life.” (The example of Jane Austen particularly comes to mind.)

[3] Another quote:

Those of us who are Anglicans, know well that the language of the Book of Common Prayer, its extraordinary beauties of sound and rhythm, can all too easily tempt us to delight in the sheer sound without thinking about what the words means, or whether we mean them. In the General Confession, for example, what a delight to the tongue and ear it is to recite:

We do earnestly repent and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings: the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable.

Is it really intolerable? Not very often. (page 40)

This quote connects with the earlier passage, where Auden points out that we cannot honestly poetize the “dreadful facts” of the crucifixion. I also think that this point can be abducted as an argument in favour of occasional use of obscene language. It seems fair to say there is a time and a place where polite language is dishonest.

Hockey and Television

Joe Pelletier offers a rather unusual comment about modern hockey, suggesting that too many games are televised:

When I was growing up, the Canucks would be on TV maybe a couple of times a month. Or sometimes not at all. The Oilers and Leafs dominated Hockey Night in Canada back then, and the Canadiens were always available on the French channel. When the Canucks were actually on TV, it was a truly special event for me. I would anticipate the puck drop all week long.

First, the response to his post is, well, interesting. I didn’t realize that “You’re dumb!” was an acceptable argument for adult conversation.

Second, I’m a lot younger than Joe, but I too remember the days when Canucks games were usually heard and not seen. And to be honest, these memories make me (mostly) agree with him.

Don’t get me wrong: the Canucks have been blessed with fantastic play-by-play talent. Jim Robson, Jim Housson, and John Shorthouse have each been a delight to listen to, so much you don’t really need the camera feed to enjoy the game. But I have to say that for the most part, TV play-by-play announces annoy me. Often, they spend half the time joking with their colour commentary pals, lazily leaving the cameras to do all the heavy lifting. That’s not a good thing.

More than that, I simply prefer hearing the game on the radio to watching it on television. This is an indefensible, silly thing to say, but it’s true. I have good memories of painful work nights that we redeemed by the Canucks’ radio broadcast. Even now, I generally work while listening to the game. Tonight, for example, I’ve managed to complete the majority of my grading, do some organizing in my study, and even write this post—all with the background of the game in Los Angeles.

In the end it really comes down to personal preference. I happen to believe (whether justified or not) that most of the bells and whistles of TV are borrowed from American sports television. Why should we care about Roberto Luongo’s career performance against the Edmonton Oilers? It might make for an interesting broadcast, but I refuse to think that the Oilers team from five years ago compares to the current incarnation. Such statistics (and there are many variations) seem largely irrelevant, designed to try and keep our attention instead of serving the game.

Hockey Night in Canada—for all its faults and foibles—is completely different. It’s an integral part of our hockey tradition and is worth the weekly wait in between broadcasts. But as for the rest, I agree with Joe: the constant televization tends to cheapen the game, and that’s a “dumb” observation at all.

The Martyr as an Unreserved Title

“The Martyr as Dramatic Hero” is the first essay in W.H. Auden’s Secondary Worlds, a collection of talks to the memory of T.S. Eliot. While outlining what distinguishes the martyr from other common hero types (i.e. the tragic hero, or the epic hero), Auden offers this sober warning:

The conception of saving truth is a highly dangerous one, for those who believe that it can be a duty to die for the truth, can come all too easily to believe that it is also a duty to kill for it. The history of the Christian Church—no other religious body has killed so many people for doctrinal reasons—has taught us that we cannot reserve the title of martyr for those who die for beliefs that coincide with our own, that a man who dies to bear witness to dialectical materialism is no less a martyr than one who dies to bear witness to the Nicene formulae. (page 17)

It should be noted that Auden is speaking of “The Martyr” as a literary type of hero (contrasting it with three other hero types). Yet, even divorced from that context, his words are worth thinking about. What is more important: a man’s life or a man’s beliefs? And on that theme, is it ever a capital offense to hold wrong beliefs? It’s only easy to say “No!” if you’re a chronological snob.