Beauty and Truth in Two Contrasting Poems about Death - by Sebastian Hayes. |
By: Sebastian Hayes |
Here Sebastian Hayes makes an original and sometimes controversial comparison between the work of one modern and one romantic poet, further exploring the themes of beauty and truth. Many of his other critical pieces, together with his songs, stories, poems, plays, and philosophical articles, can be read at www.sebastianhayes.co.uk. Visit www.brimstonepress.co.uk/biogs/SHayes.htm for further details of Sebastian's publications.
Auden and other Thirties poets deliberately set out to be ‘unpoetic’. They avoided fancy words and phrases, often introducing slang and colloquial speech instead. They chose unpoetic subjects, writing about gasometers, trains, dole queues, European politics. Being almost to a man ‘socialists’ they aimed to break down the abyss between high-brow and low-brow and to show that poetry could perfectly well deal with “the grimmer aspects of existence”. Auden specifically denied that there were any especially ‘poetic’ themes and proclaimed that poetry should be about “everything that we remember no matter how trivial” (Auden, Introduction to “The Poet’s Tongue” 1935).
What Auden & co. did not say and perhaps wished to ignore was that this very idea of ‘poetry’ against which they were fighting was itself the result of a hard-fought literary revolution — that carried out by the Romantics. Eighteenth-century and late seventeenth-century English poetry is not very ‘poetic’ in style or theme. Didactic poems were popular, i.e. read, and there were countless long poems on theological, philosophic and even semi-scientific topics — as late as the early nineteenth century Erasmus Darwin wrote a treatise on biology in verse. The poet was expected to be restrained: ‘enthusiasm’ was a term of abuse reserved for the Methodists. ‘Nature’, wild nature at any rate, was not revered but regarded with horror : the eighteenth-century aesthetic ideal was a park or well-planned garden. The favoured verse form was the rhyming couplet whose blandness and neatness strikes us today as maddening. The Romantics swept all this away: don’t preach, write about what you feel strongly about, wear your heart on your sleeve and so on. Later on, the “art for art’s sake movement” declared categorically that the artist’s concern should be with beauty, and nothing else at all. All this got decisively reversed by Auden and his successors.
It would not, I think, be entirely unfair to say that contemporary authors, both poets and prose writers, feel uneasy about ‘beauty’ and things beautiful, natural or man-made, and are loath to demonstrate strong positive emotions, or even any emotion at all. In other words, contemporary poets are not only unromantic, but actually anti-romantic. Many poets today, especially American ones, deliberately write about mundane and sordid situations because they are, purportedly, more ‘real’. The contrast with fin de siècle aestheticism could not be more complete.
Seventy-five years after Auden it is perhaps the time to take stock of the ‘revolution’ he brought about in poetry and see where it has brought us. I propose to compare two poems on the same subject, the death of a young person, one from the post-Auden era — it was written in the (nineteen) Nineties — and one from the romantic era.
Mid-Term Break
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying —
He had always taken funerals in his stride —
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
The style is what one might call ‘mannered-naturalistic’.
‘Naturalistic’ because we are given such a tremendous amount of circumstantial detail: we are, for example, told the exact time when the narrator is driven home (two o’clock), the exact time the ambulance arrives (ten o’clock), the name of the father’s friend (Big Jim Evans) and so on. Such details are entirely without significance: it would scarcely have made much difference if the narrator had been picked up at four instead of two, or if the Christian name of the father’s friend had in fact been Kevin instead of Jim. Not only is all this stuff ballast, put in presumably to encourage the reader to believe in what happened, but it actually gets in the way. I find myself puzzling over the order of events – funeral first, arrival of body later - rather than being moved by the situation.
At the same time the style is mannered: bells ‘knell’ classes to a close, the corpse has a ‘poppy bruise’ and there are no ‘gaudy’ scars - these are not straightforward descriptive words and phrases but deliberately ‘poetic’ ones, designed to get an audience reaction, ‘Oh how clever! I’d never have thought of that!’ Moreover, since they are certainly not words a schoolboy would use, they effectively prevent the poem from being a first-hand personal account. The ‘I’, the first word in the poem, is, then, a mature person reliving a past experience — is that what we’re supposed to think ? But no, it can’t be…
The combination of prosaic detail with flashback cinematographic technique and the odd stylish adjective makes the whole poem appear utterly contrived and thus insincere. This would be perfectly acceptable, indeed absolutely right if the incident were of no great significance – witness The Rape of the Lock - but since the subject is the death of a child the effect is most disagreeable. One feels that the tedious naturalistic detail is only given because the author is terrified of lapsing into sentimentality and feels he can only save himself by weighting the poem down with trivia. I don’t buy this: if you want to be naturalistic be so consistently, if you want to be sob-sob have the guts to be so with a good conscience.
In the following version I have written the poem out in prose and excised all the obviously poetic words and the last line. I suggest this ‘prose poem’ is a good deal more effective and even a more ‘poetic’ statement than what Heaney chose to give us.
Mid-Term Break
I sat all morning in the college sick bay counting the bells as the classes came to a close.
At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying — he had so far always taken funerals in his stride — also Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram when I came in, and I was embarrassed by old men standing up to shake my hand and telling me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’. Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, away at school: my mother held my hand in hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived with the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. There were snowdrops and candles by the bedside; I saw him for the first time in six weeks. Paler now, with a bruise on his left temple, he lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. He was not even scarred – the bumper had knocked him clear.
It would be unfair to compare Seamus Heaney’s poem with, say, Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality. But one can, I think, legitimately compare it with a poem on a very similar theme written by Thomas Hood, a poet of the Romantic period who is not in the first class, indeed is not reckoned much of a poet at all today.
The Death-Bed
We watch’d her breathing thro’ the night,
Her breathing soft and low,
As in her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro!
So silently she seemed to speak —
So slowly moved about!
As we had lent her half her powers
To eke her living out!
Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied —
We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died!
For when the morn came dim and sad —
And chill the early showers,
Her quiet eyelids closed — she had
Another morn than ours!
One might call this the ‘generalised emotive style’ — though simply to call it Romantic is perhaps sufficient. Certainly the Romantics brought in this type of writing and the Auden/Pound revolution banished it to limbo.
The style is ‘generalised’ because we are deliberately not given any circumstantial detail: we are not told where the scene takes place nor told the name or even approximate age of the dying girl. We have simply a girl (or possibly young woman) dying in bed during the night somewhere with friends and/or family around. All naturalistic detail such as name, place, time &c. is felt by the poet not to have the slightest significance and so is not even given a passing mention. Quite possibly, if the poem was based on a real incident (which seems likely), there actually was a baby cooing and laughing in the next room — as in the Heaney narrative — but, if so, the author keeps this out of sight and out of mind because he wants us to concentrate exclusively on the dying girl. And if we are eventually told about the weather in the last verse — we learn that the morning is cold and wet — this is done precisely to bring us down to ‘reality’ with a slight bump since the girl is now dead. Strangely enough this almost complete lack of specificity makes the scene more, not less, credible.
The style is ‘emotive’ in the sense that the author, unlike Heaney, is not at all afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve: from the word go he is pushing emotional buttons and makes no bones about it. We might expect sooner or later to get ‘the wave of life’ and lo and behold it comes in line three.
The style and language is ‘poetic’ — ‘morn’ for ‘morning’, ‘eke’ was old-fashioned even when Hood was writing. And there is a neat rhetorical reversal in the third verse that could almost have come from Pope
We thought her dying when she slept
And sleeping when she died!
Hood is not out to deceive: he makes it clear he is writing poetry and not a newspaper account, but having chosen his slightly mannered diction he keeps to it. He unashamedly wants to enlist our sympathy even if in so doing he is courting sentimentality. Because he is ‘straight’ with the reader, he convinces me that he really does feel something whereas I am not so sure about Heaney. The latter pretends to be ‘straight’ — ‘this is how it was, chaps’, I was there, I can even remember the time the ambulance arrived, think of that!’ But this is all like Tony Blair telling us, “I’m a straightforward sort of fellow”. And, as it happens, Heaney cannot resist giving us a peep behind the curtain as well from time to time; thus the ‘poppy bruise’ and ‘gaudy scars’ to demonstrate what an accomplished writer the author is when he chooses he take off his mundane local journalistic hat.
Finally, compare the two endings. Heaney leads us beautifully up the garden path to the (as he sees it) devastating last line
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
But I’m afraid I can’t see this line as at all effective : it is just a literary conjuring trick. As always with Heaney the footlight is turned on the writer, not the dead child — ‘You wouldn’t have thought of connecting the length of the coffin to the age of the person inside it, would you, now?’ It’s the sort of trick that might be taught in a contemporary creative writing class.
The ending of Hood’s poem
Her quiet eyelids closed — she had
Another morn than ours!
is both somewhat unexpected — since it is suddenly positive — and has the appropriate note of religious solemnity which death, any death, requires. Against all odds, the second-rate Romantic poem is not just prettier but actually more genuine and ‘real’ than the modern one.