The Lessons of Grief
by Robert Roper
OCTOBER 26, 2010 TAGS:
Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.
This is our greatest poet, Walt Whitman, on one of his main subjects: capital-D Death. The poet of sex, the poet of the self, of lively, obstreperous Manhattan and endlessly rocking sensuous living – the poet who went too far, and had a good time doing it – was also, centrally and constantly, concerned with death.
He wrote at a time and in a culture that was nuts about life’s end. The mid-19th century cult of a sensitive death – when dead children were laid out in open coffins for days, offered as a display at social gatherings, and sketched and painted and photographed – Whitman was in the midst of all that, a little disgusted by it, but fascinated, too. He was at one with his times; as he said in the Introduction to Leaves of Grass (1855), “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” The concerns of his countrymen would be his concerns, because a great poet is not one who goes sailing off into the high realms, scorning the mundane obsessions of his fellow citizens, but rather one who ministers to the ordinary, the ill-informed, the perplexed.
One of the attractions of Whitman’s poetry is its straightforward embrace of some of the big, mushy life questions. He is not a modern poet in the sense of being so advanced as to be incomprehensible and inimitable; no, he speaks to us in a clear voice, his poetry can (usually) be understood, even by schoolchildren and non-English majors. His book Leaves of Grass has not been made for “literary satisfactions,” he tells us; rather, it is intended “to be the Chant, the Book of Universal Life, and of the Body,--and then, just as much, to be the Chant of Universal Death, and of the Soul.”
He was attracted to the dying. Before he became a nurse in Civil War hospitals, before he sat at the bedside of tens of thousands of wounded or sick soldiers as they passed over, he haunted hospitals and assisted at operations, preparing himself, intentionally it seems, for the war that was to come. People needed to know what death was, in his era, and Walt also needed to know. From his researches at New York hospitals came at least one useful answer: Death is not the struggle before the end, the pain and the terror, but rather the deliverance:
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy….
And for love, sweet love…O praise and praise,
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.
Well, we think, he would say that, wouldn’t he? In his role as hospital nurse he was the one, often, who wrote letters of condolence to the bereaved mothers and fathers of the soldiers whose corpses were mounting up in the hospitals and out on the tragic battlefields. If he had written them letters that said, “I have had the duty of sitting at the bedside of your beloved son, John or William or whatever he was called, I was with him when he breathed his last on Tuesday night, and I want to reassure you now that he is nowhere anymore, has ceased to exist, is surely not in heaven or hell, because those destinations aren’t real, and he is surely not here anymore, because, as I was saying, he isn’t breathing now and his heart has stopped beating. Death that cunning, grinning thief has again acted with unspeakable cruelty, snatching a young man from out of life in his 19th year, before he had much of a chance to live at all. He’s gone now, completely gone, there’s a void where he used to be, and I’m sorry about that, as far as another human can be sorry. Yours truly, Nurse Walt Whitman.”
Obviously – he couldn’t, he wouldn’t write that. Walt had a brother of his own in the war, a brother he loved, and this brother was much in his mind from day to day. He could easily imagine what it would be like to get the news that brother George had been slaughtered or grotesquely wounded on this or that battlefield.
Walt was not a churchgoer; he had serious doubts about Jesus being the Son of God, and the conventional heaven of his time did not really persuade him: that realm of pure souls circulating in spotless robes, reunited for eternity with their dead loved ones, while harps played and celestial choirs intoned. He was pretty sure that was a fairy-tale, but he wasn’t so sure that there wasn’t something going on above, some place of the spirit, into which some part of us goes when we die. In this belief, he was again being commonplace – declining to get too far out in front of the beliefs of the ordinary people of his day. Most of us will at least entertain the idea that there is a place of rest, a heaven, whatever you want to call it – our attitude being, “Prove it if you’re so sure that there’s nothing, that what happens when we die is that it’s entirely over, we’re just food for the worms from then on, and that’s it.”
So, in his letters of condolence, Walt tended to avoid conventional religious sentiments, Christian sentiments; but, at the same time, he would on occasion allude to a “power” that orders the affairs of men, that spins our fates in ways we cannot understand. He was comfortable in doing so, alluding to this. He may in fact have believed in it, to a certain extent, but in any event, he noticed that talk of this kind brought some solace to bereaved people, that they appreciated such speculation in times of terrible grief.
He was nothing if not practical, Walt; and his great heart is evident in the letters he wrote, which were never vague about the identity of the dead soldier, which described him physically in his last days and hours – noting, for instance, that though dying he still had beautifully clear blue eyes, or that he had recently had a haircut. Walt had learned that many of the bereaved wanted to know exactly how death came, how and where the injury had been inflicted (“the wound became worse, and on the 4th of April the leg was amputated a little above the knee”). In a choice between reticence and its opposite, he tended to err, if erring it was, on the side of truth-telling, of detailed frankness.
One other important discovery he made: that, at times of sorrow, rule-bound performances – church funerals, for instance – were necessary and appropriate, but that real grieving was a non-performative and inward process, one that took its own path. When he lost close friends, he took time to remember them; allowed himself, in the privacy of his room, or in a walk along a moonlit river, to free-associate around the image of the man or woman now gone. Inappropriate or undignified memories – he especially valued these, they were fun and brought the dead friend back most vividly. The point was to let emerge whatever wanted to bubble forth, without censoring. Take some time, and know going in that the process will be wayward. Grieving was for him an unpredictable venturing forth not unlike the venturing into a new poem, one whose subject reveals itself if given time, if the poem is allowed to pretend to write itself.
Robert Roper, a frequent contributor to Obit, is the author of Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, available in paperback.
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.
This is our greatest poet, Walt Whitman, on one of his main subjects: capital-D Death. The poet of sex, the poet of the self, of lively, obstreperous Manhattan and endlessly rocking sensuous living – the poet who went too far, and had a good time doing it – was also, centrally and constantly, concerned with death. He wrote at a time and in a culture that was nuts about life’s end. The mid-19th century cult of a sensitive death – when dead children were laid out in open coffins for days, offered as a display at social gatherings, and sketched and painted and photographed – Whitman was in the midst of all that, a little disgusted by it, but fascinated, too. He was at one with his times; as he said in the Introduction to Leaves of Grass (1855), “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” The concerns of his countrymen would be his concerns, because a great poet is not one who goes sailing off into the high realms, scorning the mundane obsessions of his fellow citizens, but rather one who ministers to the ordinary, the ill-informed, the perplexed.
One of the attractions of Whitman’s poetry is its straightforward embrace of some of the big, mushy life questions. He is not a modern poet in the sense of being so advanced as to be incomprehensible and inimitable; no, he speaks to us in a clear voice, his poetry can (usually) be understood, even by schoolchildren and non-English majors. His book Leaves of Grass has not been made for “literary satisfactions,” he tells us; rather, it is intended “to be the Chant, the Book of Universal Life, and of the Body,--and then, just as much, to be the Chant of Universal Death, and of the Soul.”
He was attracted to the dying. Before he became a nurse in Civil War hospitals, before he sat at the bedside of tens of thousands of wounded or sick soldiers as they passed over, he haunted hospitals and assisted at operations, preparing himself, intentionally it seems, for the war that was to come. People needed to know what death was, in his era, and Walt also needed to know. From his researches at New York hospitals came at least one useful answer: Death is not the struggle before the end, the pain and the terror, but rather the deliverance:
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy….
And for love, sweet love…O praise and praise,
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.
Well, we think, he would say that, wouldn’t he? In his role as hospital nurse he was the one, often, who wrote letters of condolence to the bereaved mothers and fathers of the soldiers whose corpses were mounting up in the hospitals and out on the tragic battlefields. If he had written them letters that said, “I have had the duty of sitting at the bedside of your beloved son, John or William or whatever he was called, I was with him when he breathed his last on Tuesday night, and I want to reassure you now that he is nowhere anymore, has ceased to exist, is surely not in heaven or hell, because those destinations aren’t real, and he is surely not here anymore, because, as I was saying, he isn’t breathing now and his heart has stopped beating. Death that cunning, grinning thief has again acted with unspeakable cruelty, snatching a young man from out of life in his 19th year, before he had much of a chance to live at all. He’s gone now, completely gone, there’s a void where he used to be, and I’m sorry about that, as far as another human can be sorry. Yours truly, Nurse Walt Whitman.”
Obviously – he couldn’t, he wouldn’t write that. Walt had a brother of his own in the war, a brother he loved, and this brother was much in his mind from day to day. He could easily imagine what it would be like to get the news that brother George had been slaughtered or grotesquely wounded on this or that battlefield.
Walt was not a churchgoer; he had serious doubts about Jesus being the Son of God, and the conventional heaven of his time did not really persuade him: that realm of pure souls circulating in spotless robes, reunited for eternity with their dead loved ones, while harps played and celestial choirs intoned. He was pretty sure that was a fairy-tale, but he wasn’t so sure that there wasn’t something going on above, some place of the spirit, into which some part of us goes when we die. In this belief, he was again being commonplace – declining to get too far out in front of the beliefs of the ordinary people of his day. Most of us will at least entertain the idea that there is a place of rest, a heaven, whatever you want to call it – our attitude being, “Prove it if you’re so sure that there’s nothing, that what happens when we die is that it’s entirely over, we’re just food for the worms from then on, and that’s it.”So, in his letters of condolence, Walt tended to avoid conventional religious sentiments, Christian sentiments; but, at the same time, he would on occasion allude to a “power” that orders the affairs of men, that spins our fates in ways we cannot understand. He was comfortable in doing so, alluding to this. He may in fact have believed in it, to a certain extent, but in any event, he noticed that talk of this kind brought some solace to bereaved people, that they appreciated such speculation in times of terrible grief.
He was nothing if not practical, Walt; and his great heart is evident in the letters he wrote, which were never vague about the identity of the dead soldier, which described him physically in his last days and hours – noting, for instance, that though dying he still had beautifully clear blue eyes, or that he had recently had a haircut. Walt had learned that many of the bereaved wanted to know exactly how death came, how and where the injury had been inflicted (“the wound became worse, and on the 4th of April the leg was amputated a little above the knee”). In a choice between reticence and its opposite, he tended to err, if erring it was, on the side of truth-telling, of detailed frankness.
One other important discovery he made: that, at times of sorrow, rule-bound performances – church funerals, for instance – were necessary and appropriate, but that real grieving was a non-performative and inward process, one that took its own path. When he lost close friends, he took time to remember them; allowed himself, in the privacy of his room, or in a walk along a moonlit river, to free-associate around the image of the man or woman now gone. Inappropriate or undignified memories – he especially valued these, they were fun and brought the dead friend back most vividly. The point was to let emerge whatever wanted to bubble forth, without censoring. Take some time, and know going in that the process will be wayward. Grieving was for him an unpredictable venturing forth not unlike the venturing into a new poem, one whose subject reveals itself if given time, if the poem is allowed to pretend to write itself.
Robert Roper, a frequent contributor to Obit, is the author of Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War, available in paperback.
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