October 6, 2024

Grief Music

Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I write about what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers.

BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER

Quite early in my life, at seventeen, I set myself the task of memorizing one hundred poems. I was in the first graduating class of a small, weird school, where they allowed us to do “senior projects.” That was mine. For the final presentation, I gave the judges, two teachers and a student, a ring binder with the names and texts of all the poems, and asked them to select choices at random for me to recite—like a supremely nerdy kind of magician of verse. But I pulled it off. The list:

1. Conrad Aiken, "Music I Heard"
2. Conrad Aiken, "The House of Dust Part 1: The sun goes down in a cold pale flare of light"
3. Yehuda Amichai, " יום זכרון למתי המלחמה"
4. Yehuda Amichai, "חבל . היינו אמצאה טובה "
5. Guillaume Apollinaire, "Le Pont Mirabeau"
6. Phillip Appleman, "O Karma, Dharma, Pudding and Pie"
7. W.H. Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"
8. W.H Auden, "Musee Des Beaux Arts"
9. John Berryman, "Dream Song 1"
10. John Berryman, "Dream Song 13: God Bless Henry"
11. John Berryman, "Dream Song 14: Life, Friends, Is Boring, We Must Not Say So"
12. John Berryman, "Dream Song 114: Henry in trouble whirped out lonely whines"
13. Frank Bidart, "To The Dead"
14. Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"
15. Gamaliel Bradford, "Disorder"
16. Anne Bradstreet, "The Author To Her Book"
17. Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool"
18. Robert Burns, "Ae Fond Kiss, And Then We Sever"
19. Robert Burns, "Behold the Hour, the Boat Arrive"
20. Lord Byron, "So We'll Go No More A-Roving"
21. Catullus, "Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus"
22. Anne Carson, "Sleep Chains"
23. Paul Celan, "Corona"
24. e.e. cummings, "i love you much (most beautiful darling)
25. e.e. cummings, "the boys i mean are not refined"*
26. ee cummings, "i like my body when it is with your"*
27. John Darnielle, "Thirty short poems about my favorite black metal band: two"
28. Emily Dickinson, "I can wade grief"
29. Emily Dickinson, "Rather Arid Delight"
30. Emily Dickinson, "Wild Nights! Wild Nights!"
31. John Donne, "Batter my heart, three-person'd god"
32. John Donne, "The Broken Heart"
33. T.S. Eliot, "Preludes"
34. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Days"
35. Allen Ginsberg, "America"*
36. Arthur Guiterman, "Routine"
37. Thomas Hardy, "The Convergence of the Twain"
38. H.D., "Helen"
39. Horace, "Odes I.11"
40. Langston Hughes, "Dream Deferred"
41. Randall Jarrell, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"
42. Ilya Kaminsky, "Author's Prayer"
43. Ilya Kaminsky, "Envoi"
44. John Keats, "On A Grecian Urn"
45. Etheridge Knight, "Feeling Fucked Up"*
46. Phillip Larkin, "This Be The Verse"*
47. D.H. Lawrence, "Nothing to Save"
48. D.H. Lawrence, "The Appeal
49. Denise Levertov, "The Mutes"
50. Denise Levertov, "To The Reader"
51. Li Po, "The Jewel-Stairs' Grievance"
52. Robert Lowell, "Before the Dawn of Woman"
53. Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead”
54. Robert Lowell, "The Old Flame"

55. Robert Lowell, "To Speak of Woe That is in Marriage"
56. Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"

57. Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Love is not all: it is not meat or drink"

58. Edna St. Vincent Millay, "What lips my lips have kissed"

59. Marianne Moore, "What are Years?"

60. Pablo Neruda, "Anhelo Su Boca, Su Voz, Su Pelo"

61. Frank O'Hara, "Animals"

62. Wilfred Owen, "Dulce Et Decorum Est"

63. Wilfred Owen, "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young"

64. Dorothy Parker, "Resume"

65. Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"

66. Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus"

67. Ezra Pound, "An Immorality"

68. Ezra Pound, "Salutation"

69. Ezra Pound, "In A Station of the Metro"
70. Jack Prelutsky, "As Soon As Fred Gets Out of Bed"

71. Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo"

72. Edward Arlington Robinson, "Richard Corey"

73. Theodore Roethke, "Root Cellar"

74. Muriel Rukeyser, "Waiting For Icarus"

75. Muriel Rukeyser, "Yes"

76. Carl Sandburg, "Grass"

77. Sappho, "But you, O Dika, wreathe lovely garlands in your hair"

78. Sappho, "Come to me here from Crete"

79. Anne Sexton, "The Truth the Dead Know"

80. William Shakespeare, "My Mistress's Eyes"

81. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"

82. Charles Simic, "Late September"
83. Edith Sodergran, "Hope"

84. Wallace Stevens, "Peter Quince at the Clavier"

85. Wislawa Szymborska, "Under One Small Star"

86. Rabindranath Tagore, "Geetanjali"

87. Dylan Thomas, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower"

88. Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the White"

89. Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Kraken"

90. Marina Tsvetaeva, "Poems to Czechoslovakia: 8"

91. Marina Tsvetaeva, "From INSOMNIA: Who sleeps at night?"

92. Walt Whitman, "O me! O life!"

93. Miller Williams, "The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina"

94. William Carlos Williams, "Danse Russe"

95. William Carlos Williams, "Love Song"

96. William Wordsworth, "Surprised by joy—impatient as the wind" 

97. Yvor Winters, "On Teaching the Young" 

98. W.B. Yeats, "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"

99. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, "Girl Beatnik" 

100. Unknown Author, "Western Wind"

For some period beforehand I’d lived and breathed poetry, words seeping out of my pores, strange and enchanted phrases living in my mind like fey visitors. And like visitors they have since left me, for the most part, although I will always have more familiarity with those poems and those poets than I would have otherwise, and can often—from this initial stratum and the many poems I have read since—choose an apposite work for any occasion.

Recently, in order to take my mind off my forthcoming book and the profound anxiety of its forthcoming (the primary experience of a second book coming out is terror I have found), I’ve returned to memorizing poems, or trying to. It’s a different endeavor at thirty-five than seventeen. I have a less plastic and more obdurate brain now. Less willing to abide its own patterns being displaced by others. Less willing in general. But maybe taking more time over each poem isn’t such a bad thing.

Looking back at the list, I can see it’s a strange one; some amalgam of material I pulled off poetry websites, the few poets I’d heard of at the time, and some in foreign languages I didn’t speak. All are beautiful. But a lot of them speak to a grief I simply hadn’t felt at that age: the loss of someone close and beloved.

I have, to my regret, felt that now—that keenest kind of grief—and more than once. What occurs to me in revisiting these poems is how often grief is paired with music: as in Aiken’s lovely evocation, “Music I heard with you was more than music/and bread I broke with you was more than bread.” Loss is also compared to music and silence in Auden’s “Funeral Blues”—a demand for the cessation of sound with the name of a song. Edna St. Vincent Millay expresses her rage at grief in a “Dirge Without Music”: “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” I’ve included those poems, and others, below.

Like music and like silence, grief is a state of being. For the rest of your life the person you still love will still be dead, and that is remarkably unfair, so unfair you want to howl and then cease, howl and cease. Grief is what you feel when the storm winds die down, the bombs stop falling on the cedars. It’s the void of silence and the music of protest at loss. It is a universal and a profoundly human emotion, and for this reason poets, whose chief achievement is the distillation of human emotion into frozen music, express it best. I write about this because I miss someone I loved now so keenly—this was her season—and because of the new and monstrous waves of grief, borne on water and fire, greeting each new day of this terrible year. 

Let Anne Carson have the first word, with her strange and terrible little dirge, which I memorized so long ago, and have never since forgotten:

“The Truth the Dead Know”
By Anne Sexton 

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,   
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,   
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.   
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,   
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch   
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes   
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse   
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

---

“Music I Heard”
By Conrad Aiken  

Music I heard with you was more than music, 
And bread I broke with you was more than bread; 
Now that I am without you, all is desolate; 
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver, 
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. 
These things do not remember you, beloved, 
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart that you moved among them, 
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes; 
And in my heart they will remember always, 
—They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

---

“Dirge Without Music”
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.  Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone.  They are gone to feed the roses.  Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.  Fragrant is the blossom.  I know.  But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned.

---

“Funeral Blues” 
By W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

---

“Surprised by Joy”
By William Wordsworth

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind 
I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom 
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb, 
That spot which no vicissitude can find? 
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind— 
But how could I forget thee?—Through what power, 
Even for the least division of an hour, 
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind 
To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return 
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, 
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, 
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more; 
That neither present time, nor years unborn 
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.