“When Archie died…”
Here is a haunting poem by John Whitworth, from the August 20 & 27, 2010, issue of the TLS:
Little
When Archie died the year was dying too.
Late loitering leaves were drifting to the ground,
A time when dying has a lot to do,
And does it with a dry, susurrant sound.
Some say when Archie died it was not much –
A boy who did not walk or talk. But he
Did love to smile and laugh and look and touch.
He did do that. He did it constantly.
So small, so weak, so fragile, yet when Death,
That most ingenious and practised thief,
Unlocked the house and stooped and stopped the breath,
He left a strong sufficiency of grief.
Now is a winter and a summer since,
And now the days of dying are come again –
A year since Archie died, our Little Prince.
A year of rain and sun, and sun and rain.
Ok, I don’t know why this matters to me, but I can’t decide whether Archie was a healthy infant or a sickly and disabled youngster. Either way, it’s put me in a mood. So assuming Peter Singer has the same reaction, does he reassess his life’s work? Or is he immune.
Good question, Mark. When read the poem I immediately thought of a French saying used here to describe a dumb person, “Pierre, a vu la lune” which means “Pierre has seen the moon”. The poem has given me a totally different interpretation of the saying. So, yes, Singer should revise his life’s work.
In this poem, death is so deeply described as making a “susurrant sound” and being a “practiced thief” – powerful images and so true – but the reaction of the “some” startled me: “some say… it was not much” hurts when read and thought about – my mother spent 10 years with Alzheimers before she died last year – even now her life remains “much”. Life is about “much”. Thanks for the poem.
It is beautiful, and I think “haunting” is just the right word, because ghosts, though difficult company, do not weigh much, and the tone of the poem is light like this. The abab rhyme scheme helps with that–couplets are heavy–and the consistent understatement is beautifully light. I like it a lot.
The leaf metaphor for death is so frequent but I think it wears well anyways. It’s in the Iliad:
“Son of Tydeus, great-hearted Diomedes,
why ask me about my ancestry?
Generations of men are like the leaves.
In winter, winds blow them down to earth,
but then, when spring season comes again,
the budding wood grows more. And so with men—
one generation grows, another dies away. ” (Book VI, lines 179 ff)
and in this by Frost:
Bereft
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch’s sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
Probably the Frost poem is set at an earlier stage of grief than the Whitworth. Frost’s is much more raw, with angry overtones, even of victimization or persecution. It’s a hard poem to like, actually. The Whitworth has more of a sense of peace, I feel.
Whitworth’s poem: yes.
Leaves…I could not help thinking of the Rilke Poem Herbstag. The great Germanist Ronald Murphy SJ spent about a week on this one with us in a seminar at Georgetown in 1979:
Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.
Befiel den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird Es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
Translation by Stephen MItchell:
Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.
Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the
evening,
and wander the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.
Chanson d’automne (Verlaine) – Translation impossible
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure,
Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.
Leaf-strewing gales
Utter low wails
Like violins,—
Till on my soul
Their creeping dole
Stealthily wins….
Days long gone by!
In such hour, I,
Choking and pale,
Call you to mind,—
Then like the wind
Weep I and wail.
And, as by wind
Harsh and unkind,
Driven by grief,
Go I, here, there,
Recking not where,
Like the dead leaf.
Translated by Gertrude Hall
I thought of The Little Prince
“On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”
Thank you Fr. Komonchak and to all for the thoughtful poems. My parents passed away a couple of years ago (Mom in the spring, and Dad in December that year) and one of my sisters sent me a poem then that I really liked, part of which I still recall:
“And at night we win to the ancient inn
Where the Child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet to where all souls meet,
At the inn at the end of the world”
Ken: The poem is G.K. Chesterton’s “A Child of the Snow”:
There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,
And never before or again,
When the nights are strong with a darkness long,
And the dark is alive with rain.
Never we know but in sleet and in snow,
The place where the great fires are,
That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth
And the heart of the earth a star.
And at night we win to the ancient inn
Where the child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet where all souls meet
At the inn at the end of the world.
The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,
For the flame of the sun is flown,
The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,
And a Child comes forth alone.
Claire,
Yes, untranslatable. The Gertrude Hall version is a valiant failure.
For no really good reason other than that it’s a poem about death and children, I’m reminded of Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven.”
http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww124.html
Would be interesting to know what there is about death that seems to elicit poetry.
Perhaps its the mystery that can’t quite be caught by mere prose. Or the sense of seriousness people associate with poetry. Our village paper makes a tidy sum publishing those dreadful, canned memorial poems, often accompanied with someone with his eight-point buck or prize bass. But I know that there’s sincere grief–and hope–that motivated the effort to dig out those pictures and go down to the paper and pick out one of the poems.
One finds them strangely moving, almost to the pointof admitting in a public forum that one says a Hail Mary when one encounters them. Almost.
Then there is Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall”:
Here is Hopkins’s poem, “Spring and Fall”:
To a young child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Ken and Joe cited Chesterton’s poem. He touched on the same theme in his prose, too. Steve Privett S.J. quoted him at the end of his inaugural address as president of the University of San Francisco:
And this also, from Hopkins:
FELIX RANDAL
Felix Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?
Sickness broke him. Impatient he cursed at first, but mended
Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!
This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.
My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,
Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!
” Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended! ”
I’ve never quite understood this expression. Help? Jean?
I’ve also never understood how Hopkins gets away with such wild alliteration. He does!
Kathy,
Catherine Phillips’s excellent notes for the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Hopkins’s “Major Works” explain:
“God rest him”: God forgive him
“all road ever”: Lancashire dialect, “for whatever (sins) he committed”
And as for the alliteration, what’s wild about it? Hopkins tightly controlled every element of his verse, did nothing without a reason, usually a good one, and believed that alliteration was a natural spring of English verse. If he overdid it — if — it was not in a fit of wildness or for lack of scruple. He was one the most scrupulous poets in the language.
Matthew,
You seem to think I’m criticizing Hopkins. I’m not. I’m admiring him: I would like to understand how he can do what no one else can.
Natalie Merchant has a beautiful setting for Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall” on her new album:
http://www.rtve.es/mediateca/videos/20100412/natalie-merchant-spring-and-fall/742693.shtml
Kathy, we don’t speak Lancashirian in Michigan, though it would be natural for anyone to think that we might understand obscure country colloquialisms, what with our “party stores,” “pop,” “euchre” and “fish cops”; all three played a major role in the eulogy my cousin wrote for Uncle Dick. Dean Martin was also mentioned because Uncle Dick looked like him in his hey day. Had Dean worn a black leather jacket and rode a Harley.
But pretty much everybody at the funeral was from here, so nobody was confused.
Thanks, anyway, Jean. I know from euchre and pop (my mom’s from near Flint) but I find the idea of “fish cops” foreign and intriguing!
I google-booked someone’s dissertation and s/he thinks that Hopkins was trying to bridge the gap between poet-priest and farrier, by using colloquialism. That’s more than plausible, but it sure doesn’t make sense of the word (or sound) “road.”
“Any road” is a variant on “any way”. So “Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!” means something like: God spare him any way in which he offended.”
I forget which mystery series set in northern England made me acquainted with “any road”.
In Michigan, we say “anyways,” which can mean “in any way” or as a transition, often signalling the end of a phone conversation or the end of a freshman comp paper as in, “So anyways, you can see from what I have written that smoking can be quite bad for everyone.”
Re ‘Little’ Archie in the poem is a little boy who died. Archie ‘in real life’ was a little boy who died too, but his name was different and his attributes too. The litle boy was disabled but he could speak. Theer was another boy who couldn’t talk but he, as far as I know, is still alive. They were at a respite home where my daughters worked. Neither of them was called Archie. Archie was a third little boy, a Downs’ syndrome boy, very noisy, very loveable. So were they all.
‘Leaves’. I’d like to add what Vladimir says repetitively about leaves in ‘Waiting for Godot’.
Thank you, Mr. Whitworth, for your note about your poem. It helps us all understand it better. I think you can tell from our discussion that it prompted a good deal of thought.