The Dead Are Difficult: Jenny George’s “After Image”

“The tone of After Image is simultaneously calm and feverish, as the bereaved one moves along a spectrum from numb to utterly passionate, up and down, yet never hysterical, never heaping ashes on her head.”

A hallmark of elegy is that its lament of grief be both private and public. Its three typical stages are lament, praise for the dead, and consolation of the aggrieved. These stages can be seen not only in classic poems such as John Milton’s “Lycidas” but in modern ones such as W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.”

Yet what if the poetry offers no public aspect as such, other than the fact that anyone who might read the poem stands as a working public? And what if that is because there exists no definitive and final consolation to be had? Has the poet given in then to pessimism? Does that make the supposed elegy a mere complaint? Or does the lack of a tacitly listening, consoling public rather open up new possibilities for the function of elegiac poetry, renewing the form and giving it a more nuanced, less outwardly facing and less showy purpose? Could the insularity of going it alone represent a more realistic, believable strategy for getting to the heart of things?

When I went back to Auden’s poem recently, one I remembered as affecting, it struck me as overly didactic in parts, even sanitized, in its eagerness to instruct us in how to think and behave.

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

What if I am not ready to heal after a dozen stanzas? What if I do not want to receive aphorism-based marching orders? One cannot but admire Auden’s poetic skill in general, but what has most hardily survived in this most famous of his poems is the meme-ready assertion “Poetry makes nothing happen,” a phrase that has been debated as much as the rest of the poem has been forgotten by contrast. That is the problem with maxims and imperatives. They apply to too many cases, on account of their universalizing thrust.