“Most things never happen: this one will”. Poets write more frequently about death than any other subject, except possibly love. That is not surprising. Death is a colossal subject – “nothing more terrible, nothing more true”. Perhaps man’s most remarkable talent is for ignoring death and coming to terms with it takes up a good deal of man’s time. Probably the chief way is in the form of religion in which the only miracle worth talking about is immortality. But there is also literature. However, very often literature does not give us the hard truth about death. We are left feeling that somehow it is all right. Either because death isn’t going to happen (“one short sleep, we wake eternally”). Or, if it does happen, it is something we need not worry about (“so long as we exist, death is not with us, but when death comes, then we do not exist”). Or, if it does happen, it is really rather nice and comfortable (“in a sleep deeper and calmer than that of infancy, wrapped in the finest and softest dust”). Or, finally, life would be very dull without death (“it is immeasurably heightened”).
But all that is not the reality. Death is awful, ruthless, irretrievable, terrifying, and above all, conclusively ends the glory and interest of being alive. That cannot be wrapped in circumlocutions. One poet who never tried to do so was Philip Larkin. “Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily”, La Rochefoucauld said. Larkin at least tried.
Here is one of his poems on the subject.
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more
true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
