“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.
Gillian Groszewski gives us another way of thinking about elegy in an essay on Robert Lowell’s two most elegiac volumes of poetry, Lord Weary’s Castle and Life Studies.
She notes his “departure from the traditional, mythic contexts of the pastoral elegy, more overt and uneasy focus on the isolated self of the griever and its more nakedly expressive style.” Quoting Peter Sacks, Groszewski also suggests that the elegies of Lowell often have “a frighteningly raw and immediate feeling, as if their speakers were fighting not just for an aesthetically acceptable form of consolation but for their own literal survival.”
Isolated, raw, naked, immediate, fighting for survival. That is grief I want to read about, and not only at the poem’s beginning, as a rhetorical setup, but as a simulation of an ongoing situation of chronic malaise, a spiritual near-death induced by another’s literal death.
Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton et alii all got a bad rap when they were referred to as “confessional poets,” as if they were grandstanding in disproportion to their suffering, undisciplined, excessive. I have always been attracted to the fact that Lowell, who is an adept technician, stumbles around in the mud before he gets up, rather than simulating a premature or formulaic overmastering of emotion. To put it another way, you’ve got to be drunk before you’re sober, crazy before you’re sane. This famous brahmin habitué of the lunatic asylum comes closer than many to the real and erratic, sometimes lifelong, nature of grief. Even poems of his that are about something else can at any moment introduce an impetuous elegiac note, such as “Waking in the Blue.”
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My heart grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)
Most of us have witnessed another person shaking with sobs at a funeral, as words about the deceased are spoken. But that is no match for the stunned grief that may suddenly overtake that same person as he or she sits alone on a porch drinking tea alone in the middle of the afternoon, three years after the funeral, when supposed acceptance and consolation have already happened, and then they must set the glass down from their unexpectedly shaking hand lest it shatter on the terracotta tiles. “Lycidas,” by contrast, gives us a definitive happy ending.
At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
In Lowell’s “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms,” the speaker recalls his father’s sudden death from a coronary, with numbness, long after the fact.
Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting.
His vision was still twenty-twenty.
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
his last words to Mother were:
“I feel awful.”
There is no consolation here for the brutal and pedestrian abruptness of the father’s going. How does one wring dignity out of the squalid phrase “I feel awful”? The son is left in the mire by a naked image that may resurface many times before eventually settling out of sight.
Thus we come to the splendid, subtle, nuanced, but ultimately punch-packed recent work of poetry by Jenny George, After Image. Her temperament is different from that of Lowell, more formal, quieter, often on the down-low, yet the sting is equally deep and lasting. The title is suggestive of how she works: grief as a daily occurrence, layer upon layer, in different moods, with both progress and regress, rather than a false linear forward movement.
Her world is one where the dead (or undead) and the living often touch, unnervingly real.
The dead are difficult.
One of them was looking at me last night
from the hallway. Almost seeing me, I don’t know.
There was a quality like unmoving pondwater.
And a peculiar gleam like a false dawn.
The dead are not personal. That is part of the difficulty.
One thinks of Odysseus in the underworld, gazing with pained indifference on Castor and Polydeuces, of whom he remarks, “Life-giving earth has buried them, although they live on still.” There is a removed quality, yet the dead are utterly and eternally present. “That is part of the difficulty.” Grief means, in George’s case, you cannot get rid of those you love to simply move on with your life, for they form part of that life, even though “the dead are not personal.” There exists no ultimate closure.
The poet’s precise lyrical etching of her field of feelings, like the best lyric poetry, manifests largely as arresting imagery.
You become Not-you.
A postcard of snow.
They tell me you
are at “rest.”
In the window’s cold
rectangle a rose arbor
shipwrecked in a white field.
One can feel this speaker quietly struggling to keep emotion in check as she works to accept the stark truth. So deep does this literally cold fact penetrate into her psyche that it forms part of “Ars Poetica,” her very self-conception as an artist.
Over the hours spanning dead of night
and early dawn, her face
changed to a stone under the surface
of a bright, transparent stream.
I observed this
happening. Like sex—
one part of me always remains
utterly unmoved.
The figuration of the dead beloved’s face as a stone underwater is haunting, disturbing, easy to visualize. The revelation of the speaker partly unmoved by sex with her partner in life is a somewhat shocking confession in this context, yet highly realistic, an insight dislodged post-mortem once the immediate love object has been removed. The muted pain of life becomes sharper and more evident post-mortem. In these pages, there is a constant reckoning with the self, for which this death is a spur. The unflinching tone lends this poem the chilly nobility of Greek tragedy, as when Antigone insists at all costs on burying her brother, despite Creon’s prohibition.
“Do what you think is right; I will bury him.
It’s a beautiful thing, to die in this act.
With him I will rest, beloved with beloved,
And I will be a god-fearing criminal. I need to please
The gods of death more than the men on Earth,
As I will rest below forever.”
Orpheus and Eurydice, that famous live-dead couple, also get poems in After Image. There are many intense bursts of emotion in this book, but, inevitably, they are underplayed, in a matter of fact manner punctuated by a poignant image.
The body is not a place.
you learned this when her body became a sound
your voice was trying to make.
One might say George’s poetry has a ceremonial aspect, akin to what happens at a funeral service, except that it is utterly personal, an ongoing prayer-reflection that must happen in solitude in order to be effective. It is a funeral of one, for one. Naturally, the classic “overheard” aspect of lyric is in play, but it is as if the speaker, hyper-focused on wrestling with the immediate surge of renewed grief, chooses not to acknowledge us. It is almost a game, signifying for us while pretending we’re not there.
We also experience decorous, sheer observation of the niceties of the funeral process, in which agony is understated and again, strong feeling gets redeemed by an indelible image.
Before the two men from the mortuary touched
her body, they put their hands into black silk gloves.
Four black butterflies wove the sheet into a chrysalis
around her.
The speaker watches those butterflies convey the corpse “out into the bright, etherizing light of late spring.” But whatever the season, always in these pages there is snow, lots of snow, killing blossoms, “a fury of snow.” And ice. The bereaved poet moves among gods and gardens and grief, brimming with feeling as if with the water that comprises her own body, including her tears, yet taking care not to spill it on the ground where it too might become ice. She dreams, also, allowing her to shape-shift.
When I fall asleep in the afternoon
I see myself from the outside.
A life is just a large, toppled flower
floating on a pond.
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. Rather, she practices a dutiful detachment, one that allows her to see clearly, even while constantly reliving the suffering induced by the loss, one that permeates her being the way smoke from a house fire bonds with the weave of a deep pile carpet. This distanced, pensive, feelingly analytical quality is one of the key aspects of this book, and what makes this corpus of elegiac poems feel truer than a number of more conventional elegies. That is, we watch her break on through, only to regress to rawness, then pull herself together again, making circumspect observations, reminding herself that life goes on, even while the shadow of her lover’s death stalks her consciousness.
Whatever assertions are made, the rhetoric of each poem is held in check by its reinsertion in the realm of memorable yet everyday images that bear specific lyric witness to her immediate psychological condition.
The flower transfers to me its emptiness.
Then the self is in the body again,
my face hot on the pillow, a hornet
nudging the upper corner of the room
with the sound of a small machine.
And the poet is smart enough to give us (and herself) the occasional replenishing reprieve, as in “Civility.”
On a breezy summer evening
we dined outside, the corners of the table weighted
with little solid silver rabbits.
A draining light caught the treetops…
We had apricots glazed in good wine, spooned out
clear as birdsong
onto individual dishes.
There is no arc of redemption in this collection. We understand implicitly that the process of grieving and remembrance—as often in the real world—might go on for a lifetime. Meanwhile, the self, permanently tarnished by loss, maintains a certain dignity. The individual poems have been arranged in an intuitive manner, as in a playlist, yet they manage to comprise an organic whole with its own sort of dramatic structure—more a series of ripples and waves, the coming and going of a tide, than a hard arc. Modestly, George closes this playlist with a charming small poem, “Tin Bucket,” and the image of someone lovingly washing someone else’s hair. As always, water is the healing element, if only for today.
Have you ever washed a person’s hair
over a tin bucket,
gently twisting the rope of it
to wring the water out?
At the end of everything,
dancers just use air as their material.
A voice keeps singing even without an instrument.
You make your fingers into a comb.
For a precious moment, the one left behind has recovered her wits, speaking to herself, and to us, her working public, forgetting for a happy instant the loss she carries, as a voice, hers or ours, keeps singing without an instrument.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
