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.

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.

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.

The Unsuitable Cross

One last quote from David Adams Richards’s God Is.

As one theologian has said: “Faith begins where to the unbeliever proof in the absence of God is substantiated.” That is, faith begins at the cross. I do not know why that is, but I have seen it all my life. When Christ says, “Pick up your cross and follow me,” he is not saying look around and find one, suitable to the journey. He is saying you will have one given to you that is most unsuitable and you will hate to carry it, but you will have to. The fact is, whether or not you believe in him, the cross will still be there. You will, in so many ways, still carry one. That is the secret. (pages 157-158).

What Is Actual Violence and What Is Not

David Adams Richards’s God Is. reads like a series of concentric circles. The broad theme of the book is stated in the subtitle: “My Search for Faith in a Secular World.” However, Richards constructs this theme by pondering love and violence, liberty and power, sincerity and con games. This following section, highlighting these themes in the classic film High Noon (one of my favourites), captures the crux of this scattered yet worthwhile book.

There is a courageous journey as well in the movie High Noon, with Gary Cooper as sheriff who just married that very day, Amy—Grace Kelly—a Quaker woman opposed to violence. These, of course, are old morality plays—but they are plays that must be observed. The sheriff has put a man away, kept the town safe from a man who is now out and, along with his brother and two cronies, are coming to exact revenge. (These people, like the mob I referenced, never act alone.) No one stands up for Cooper or with him. The town turns coward—and some profess their indifference—by hiding and drinking in the tavern, or profess their moral superiority by going to church and praying. (This tavern and church are shown here to be one and the same.) It is interesting how all of these townspeople now turn on the sheriff and blame him, not only for his own difficulty but for the position he has put them in. The tavern and the church become the twin pillars of a false morality in the witnessing of one man’s agony.

Cooper has to fight the four men alone, and he does—with Amy finally coming to his aid and saving his life.

Nothing shows better the idea of a pretension toward goodness enabling evil. For the surface good, the surface morality is neither.

Therefore what counts must finally be recognized, and it will be sooner or later. Maybe not within the confines of a two-hour movie, or a ten-page story, but someday and for all time. It will also be known what is actual violence and what is not. Those in church were far more violent than Gary Cooper’s character that day. (pages 125-126)