Poetry about death

Whew! I've spent the last few months finishing my degree, but now can focus again on poetry, so.. up first, a subject I've been thinking - and writing - about.

How many poems are about the inevitability of death? Quite a lot.

Billy Collins said "there's one subject in lyric poetry, and that is you have this existence and at the end of it you're going to experience non-existence" (The Independent, 31 May 2003).

Well, that's a theme in many of the poems I've read, from Keats' mellifluous descriptions of life as "where men sit and hear each other groan" in Ode to a Nightingale, to Larkin's Aubade, where death stands "plain as a wardrobe, what we know and have always known".

Death can be longed for, fetishized - Anne Sexton's death baby, for example - or desired as certainty or absence of pain (Keats), or feared (Bowers in Autumn Shade). We don't actually know it since we only experience dying and cannot fully experience it through another's death.

I think of Stevens' Sunday Morning, a defence of atheism, arguing that "death is the mother of beauty", though in this schema Christianity is all about Jesus' sacrifice, death and morbidity, so to argue that this changeless immortal paradise - where ripe fruit never falls - is inadequate because we need death to appreciate life, or that beauty can only exist in relation to its end, seems contradictory...

Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn moves from appreciation of the urn's figures' stability to their static lifelessness, implying change is life, hence death is indispensable, even as he writes "beauty is truth, truth beauty". In Larkin's Aubade religion is a "vast, moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die".

Stanley Kunitz said "there's always an element of the erotic about death" (The Wild Braid), and how many love poems are based on the changefulness of the adored person, or the speaker themselves, or love? So many of Shakespeare's sonnets are on this theme (such as sonnet 18, where poetry is the only way to freeze time - "thy eternal summer shall not fade".

A collection of poems about death and dying was published in the last few years in NZ (Moonlight, 2008, edited by poet Andrew Johnston), but this was more about grief, and more personal. I must say I've only flicked through it in the bookstore, so this is not a criticism.

The reason this theme has been on my mind is that I've been thinking about subject and purpose of poetry. What do we write and read about, and why? Poetry itself, an expression, a communication, an art. Do we write it to make ephemeral things more permanent? Interesting logic. Shakespeare and other famous poets may have their works live long after their death, but for most of us obscure people what we write might have a zenith as a poem or two in a local literary magazine, that if valued might be archived by a public library or national cultural archives. I know when I write a poem it sets down something, but the poem itself, the words on the paper, last as long as the paper is preserved or the digital file saved, which might not be for very long. You could argue, and I have, that this real poem is a shadow of the poem that the writer had in mind, and that 'Poem' is immortal, being an idea. What Shakespeare had in mind as he wrote that sonnet will never be known. All we have is the real poem. This 'Poem' is of value for the writer and the writer alone.

So we struggle against the death we know is coming, and whether religion comforts us or not (and increasingly in poetry it is not), poetry can be written as an attempt to deal with the experiences or emotions raised by this thought. Does the poet think this poem itself will cheat death? Keats used poesy to try to escape the thought of death in Ode to a Nightingale, but it didn't work, and that failure is the haunting end to the poem. "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music - do I wake, or sleep?"