Some of the best poetry has been written by people on the verge of death. It is hard for me to credit this because I myself cannot imagine writing, indeed doing, anything valuable when I am feeling low and out of sorts much less when in the throes of coping with that fearful and final antagonist. But then, I suppose, no one can really know until the thing actually happens. Certainly the imminent prospect of death seems to have been a spur for some of the finest compositions by artists, musicians and poets.
One of the greatest poetic meditations on death itself is contained in John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. In this poem Keats, already doomed to die at the age of 26 from the then untreatable scourge of tuberculosis, muses on the immortal sublimity of the nightingale’s song and in the peace of that beauty accepts the welcome release of death: “Now more then ever seems it rich to die/To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” Composed in the shadow of the poet’s dying, this is one of the most beautiful lyric poems ever written.
Other poets have faced up to and very exactly described the brutal experience which dying most often is. The American writer John Updike’s extraordinary collection of poems Endpoint never flinches for a single moment in the face of his impending, inevitable death from metastasising lung cancer. He notes his diagnosis.
Needle Biopsy
All praise be Valium in Jesus’ name
a CAT-scan needle biopsy sent me
up a happy cul-de-sac, a detour not
detached from consciousness but sweetly part –
I heard machines and experts murmuring about me –
a dulcet tube in which I lay secure and warm
and thought creative thoughts, intensely so,
as in my fading prime. Plans flowered, dreams.
All would be well, I felt, all manner of thing.
The needle, carefully worked, was in me, beyond pain,
aimed at an adrenal gland. I had not hoped
to find, in this bright place, so solvent a peace.
Days later, the results came casually through:
The gland, biopsied, showed metastasis.
And in a poem not long before he finishes his life he sets down a moving explanation of what books, his writing, words indeed have meant to him. It is a beautiful passage in farewell praise of the writer’s craft.
“Here in this place of arid clarity,
two thousand miles from where my souvenirs
collect a cozy dust, the piled produce
of bald ambition pulling ignorance,
I see clear through to the ultimate page,
the silence I dared break for my small time.
No piece was easy, but each fell finished,
in its shroud of print, into a book-shaped hole.
Be with me, words, a little longer, you
have given me my quitclaim in the sun,
sealed shut my adolescent wounds, made light
of grownup troubles, turned to my advantage
what in most lives would be pure deficit,
and formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts.”
End poems. There is one I have read by Clive James which I find crafted with such quiet beauty in praise of life and acceptance of death. Clive James is dying of terminal leukemia. Somehow he is writing as well as he ever did when he was in the full flow of his celebrated career as journalist, novelist, critic, memoirist, television/producer and poet. Here is the poem he has just written.
Japanese Maple
Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:
Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?
Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:
Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.
A beautiful poem he has gifted to us before his end. May it be granted that he, that anyone we love, will have the grace and benefit to cease upon some midnight without pain.
