written January/February 1987
1
One of the things that convinces me of the authenticity of Solomon Volkov's Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich is what he
reports Shostakovich to have said about death. After commenting that death "is not considered an appropriate theme for Soviet art", Dmitri goes
on to say that he nevertheless composed a number of works on the theme and. as a result, now fears death less than he did. Taking "a rational
approach" to death means facing it in one's art, accustoming oneself to the idea of it, making it familiar. I particularly warm to him when
he denies that writing about death is morbid.
"Somehow it's considered improper for young people to write about death. Why? When you ponder and write about death, you make some gains. First,
you have time to think through things that are related to death and you lose the panicky fear."
I would add that the importance of the artist is that he enables his audience to pass through the same meditative processes that he's gone through
himself. So, when people tell me that some of my poetry is morbid, I deny it. What their objection amounts to is no more than this: it is a
rationalization of their own reluctance, or refusal, to face the experiences which my poems explore. In rejecting them, they turn away from
that part of themselves which is afraid of death.
I'm always liable to be enthralled by works of art - particularly of poetry and music - which explore death. I would cite some of Shostakovich's
own music - notably the Second Cello Concerto and the Eighth String Quartet - also Warlock's Curlew cycle. Among poets I would list Hardy, Edward
Thomas and C.H. Sisson.
The Waste Land, which continues to be one of the most insistent pieces of artistic mental furniture in my possession, is a locus classicus
for my argument. How often have I encountered students (especially at the commencement of a period of study of Eliot's poem) who say they find
it merely "depressing"? When I ask why, the same answer is always forthcoming: "Because of its view of life." Now it seems to me that such readers
reduce the poem to its paraphrasable content, missing precisely what in it makes it a poem. What I'm talking about here is the
difference between the raw experience of art and that experience when it has passed through the creative mind of an artist. The discredited
term "form" is quite inadequate to express what I mean: what makes the work of art valuable is whatever that raw experience of which I have
spoken gains in passing through the matrix which is the creative mind of the artist: in the case of poetry, a coherence, resonance, weight (call
it what you will) which inheres in rhythm, tone, sonic patterning, and so on. It is this extra (though integral and indeed inseparable) freight
which makes possible the artistic experience and is valuable and potentially redemptive. When you have "tuned into" The Waste Land, and
are aware of whatever it is in the poem which is not paraphrasable content, it is impossible to find it depressing. What you then encounter
is a kind of double-minded thing: on the level of attitude or paraphrasable meaning the poem would seem to offer a pretty desperate view of
life, but all that makes it poetry denies and refutes the desperation. What you are in fact encountering is that positivity which irradiates
all true art, no matter how dark or stark the experience expressed there. The impulse which provoked the artist to an act of creation as opposed
to lying on his bed staring at the ceiling, or moaning about the intransigence of existence to a like-minded friend, must of its nature be life-affirming.
A thoroughgoing life-despair, for the artist, can only be expressed by silence - that is, the refusal or inability to create. As long as there
is creation, there is life: the artist is active, engaged in the work of transmutation.
2
In a recent seminar discussion with my poetry class we were reading poem III of In Memoriam.
0 Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
0 Priestess in the vaults of Death,
0 sweet and bitter in a breath.
What whispers from thy lying lip?
'The stars,' she whispers, 'blindly run;
A web is wov'n across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:
'And all the phantom, Nature, stands -
With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own, -
A hollow form with empty hands.'
And shall I take a thing so blind,
Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?
W, one of the women in the class - an ex-nurse who must be assumed to have seen enough of death in the flesh to last her a lifetime - remarked
that Tennyson was clearly morbid, that it's "unwholesome" for people to dwell, to the extent that Tennyson does, on death and the idea that
the universe might be devoid of any purposes that a Creator might be supposed to wish to imbue a universe with - the loss of the poet's best
friend notwithstanding. Well of course I didn't agree (nor as it happens did the other members of the group) - but this is how poets must often
seem to the well-adjusted among us (if indeed there are such persons), and their point of view is perhaps not so easily dismissed as I would
like to think. I'm also uncomfortably reminded that my pleasure in poems like this is partly an aesthetic one, that poems provoke in people
art-emotions that are proper to the sphere of art, and aren't identical to the emotions which occur in life. When this is said, however, Tennyson's
poem is still there on the page, still possessed of a tremendous power of excitement for me - and possessed of this power because it seems to
me that the horrifying idea which the poet is expressing excited him in the act of composition. The opening stanza is easily the weakest:
first because it seems to be cast in an archaic vocative mode and a conventional Romantic style, and second because it tries to prejudge matters
by calling Sorrow a liar. Whether she is so remains to be seen - or even more, to be proved (and Tennyson makes no attempt to prove a
case). Tennyson's Victorianism declares itself in his insistence that such ideas as the poem entertains must come from the mouth of Sorrow
- or depression, or despair. If he could have persuaded himself that such ideas are not the product of sick minds he would have been well on
the way towards a true modernity, to being a poet who transcends his age rather than one who is contained by it. But (as John Fowles has persuasively
argued in The French Lieutenant's Woman), Tennyson fails to make the break with Christianity which would allow him to step over the mind's
threshold into a liberating existentialism. The existentialist approach accepts Nature as a "hollow form" in one sense ("hollow" because he
rejects all meanings derived from manmade metaphysical systems and then wished onto, or into, phenomena) in order to find it 'full' in another
sense: full of self-sufficient being. It's instructive that the pronoun "her" in Tennyson's fourth stanza has by this time come to comprehend
both the "she" who is Sorrow and the "she" who is the "blind" cosmos - or mother Nature. The choice, as Tennyson sees in a later poem in In Memoriam,
is between God and Nature ("Are God and Nature then at strife?"): but the double-minded Victorian in him must opt for masculine Divinity as
opposed to feminine Nature. Reason, which justifies the phenomenal world through ontological exegesis, is masculine - paternalistic even; but
feminine nature simply is - existence is enough in itself, "to be" sufficient to the day. Tennyson in the end cannot embrace "the natural
good" which is unconditional existence; but then, on the other hand, can you actually eradicate a virus once it has entered the bloodstream?
You may succeed in neutralizing it, but it will always remain inside you, a part of your bodily substance. One wonders if Tennyson in old age
was still at times pricked by a consciousness that he himself might have failed to evolve beyond the limitations of his age.
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