You know, there is nothing whatsoever new about what’s being
expressed in this poem. Except, obviously, it’s of overriding importance to the
speaker at the moment. How can I die? Annie Dillard takes on something like
this in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:
Evolution loves death more than it
loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe. The
words are simple, the concept clear—but you don’t believe it, do you? Nor do I.
How could I, when we’re both so lovable? Are my values then so diametrically
opposed to those that nature preserves? This is the key point.
Henry never much cared for nature, but nature gets the last
word—always. And yes, his values were
diametrically opposed to those that nature preserves. Yeats too. Yeats may not
have liked that his soul was tethered to a dying animal, but his soul was
tethered to a dying animal. His striving for an immortal ideal in the singing
of artifice is ultimately not life. It’s a rejection of life or a construction
of life’s replacement, but it’s all about living in the future. It has nothing
to do with life itself, which is always about the moment. The biosphere
evolves, but it doesn’t plan. Change happens moment by moment. That’s all.
When you abuse the shit out of your body, your own little
corner of the biosphere that you may call your own but regard instead as just a
biological inconvenience (possibly a seat of pleasure), and that nonetheless is
the only tangible support of the art you have so striven for, well the question
has to eventually come up: May I expect a fresh version of living, or will it
all stop wholly? Don’t look at me for the answer, Henry. Smarter people than me
have been asking this same question for a hundred thousand years. Some think
they’re sure of the answer, but there’s never enough surety to keep us from
asking it again with every individual’s eventual confrontation with his or her own,
particular end. But I’m so lovable! Faith in something makes the whole process
easier, but faith by definition means trust in something you can’t prove. Miracles
and apocryphal visitations from angels aside, you don’t get to know.
Henry’s address to Wordsworth and Keats isn't really to
Wordsworth and Keats. Not to the men who lived, did their work, died in their
due time—though Keats was taken too, too early. Henry is talking to their
reputations, that ghost of the future that he is pinning his hopes on.
Wordsworth is a “form almost divine.” I can pretty much guarantee that Henry didn’t
get the answer he was begging for, brought by angels floating down from the
rafters, perhaps, with a celestial telegram from Wordsworth pinned to a satin
pillow. But it’s an understandable plea from a guy finding himself in the hospital
again, after who knows what nervous
breakdown or episode of delirium tremens or insensible three-day drunk.
After “decades questing”—writing—he winds up in the hospital.
Blind. Which is to say, no closer to the answer he seeks than anybody else,
ever. There are people who pray sincerely to God, and they believe in all the
power of their faith that they have been given the answer. A just reward waits
for them. Good for them. Henry ain’t praying to God. He’s praying to Wordsworth’s
immortal reputation, and Keats’s. This is the star his faith steers by. They’re silent from this point of view as
actual stars, though. They’ve had their say. Nothing new is coming. It’s a
ringing, maddening silence, punctuated only be the regular drip-drip-drip of
the IV he’s likely got stuck in his arm. In this day and age you don’t get much
silence in a hospital with all the blinking and beeping going on, but the
spiritual silence is as empty as ever. The chaplain’s visits are nothing but reminders
of how alone he really is.
There may be nothing new in this DS, but it evoked a strong response.
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