by Thomas Lynch
MAYBE IT IS time to get some sleep.
AMONG MY WRITERLY friends, the hushed talk eventually comes round to the fact that I’m a funeral director. How is it, they want to know, that someone who writes sonnets also embalms, sells caskets, drives a hearse and greets the mourners at the door? It strikes them a strange commingling: the mortuary and literary arts. Why, they wonder, don’t I take up a day job teaching grad students something meaningful about dactyls and pentameters at the university?
Among my fellow funeral directors, I am likewise suspect. There are dark rumors about bookish and artistic “types”—a wariness that owes, I suppose, to Mitford and Waugh—a mistrust of wordsmiths and journalists. Why, they wonder, don’t I take up golf or the stock market, boating or Web browsing?
Of course, my publishers have made some hay off this, to their advantage and to mine. An “undertaker/poet,” like a cop who sings opera or a wrestler turned governor, makes for good copy and easy interviews. Oddity and celebrity are near enough cousins. Ink and airtime—coin of the realm in the info-tainment industry—are easier when you have a quirky angle.
Much the same, the mortuary associations have put me on the “circuit” of state and national conventions, where I’m fresh fodder for the programs and exhibit committees. After years of psycho-babblers and marketing gurus dispensing warm-fuzzies and motivationals, a reading and book signing by a “poet and author and one of our own” has a certain panache.
I charge accordingly, as any dancing bear would do.
BUT HERE’S THE quiet little truth of the matter. Requiems and prosodies, sonnets and obsequies, poems and funerals—they are all the same. The arrangement of flowers and homages, casseroles and sympathies; the arrangement of images and idioms, words on a page—it is all the same—an effort at meaning and metaphor, an exercise in symbol and ritualized speech, the heightened acoustics of language raised against what is reckoned unspeakable—faith and heartbreak, desire and pain, love and grief, the joyous and sorrowful mysteries by which we keep track of our lives and times.
Sometimes I see in the stillness of the dead the blank space between stanzas, the held breath of inspiration, the silence that rhymes with almost anything. The math of each enterprise is imprecise—wholesale, retail, rhyme and meter, the counting of syllables, the tally of charges: all numbers games that end in bottom lines. Still, the words we cut in stone or shape in poems are worth more, somehow, than the usual palaver.
A good funeral, like a good poem, is driven by voices, images, intellections and the permanent. It moves us up and back the cognitive and imaginative and emotive register. The transport seems effortless, inspired, natural as breathing or the loss of it. In the space between what is said and unsaid, in the pause between utterances, whole histories are told; whole galaxies are glimpsed in the margins, if only momentarily. At wakes and in verse, both absence and presence inform the work. What is said and what is unsaid are both instructive. The elegist and eulogist must both attend to the adverbs, be sparing with the adjectives, be mindful of the changing tense of predicates and have a sense of when enough is enough. The fashions in verse-making and leave-taking are always changing while the fundamental witness remains the same. Good poems and good funerals are stories well told.
It is likewise so that we poets and funeral directors have a fondness for black, the keening of pipers, irregular hours, free drink and horizontal bodies. Our children uniformly report that we often seem distracted. Our spouses endure our bouts of passion and distemper, egomania and inferiority. Whether we err on the side of excess or meanness, when we miss the point, we miss it badly.
We are all the same. And no two are alike. Dante’s Commedia, Grant’s Tomb, your child’s first quatrain, your one and only mother’s death, your father’s.
WHENEVER FUNERAL DIRECTORS get together they talk about the fact that no one likes funerals. Whenever poets get together they talk about the fact that no one likes poetry. Co-misery plays a big part in their get-togethers. There are worries over audience interest and the marketplace.
For poetry readings the general rule is that if the poet is outnumbered, it is a success. If outnumbered by a dozen or more, it is a huge success. A crowd like the crowds they turn up in Rotterdam—hundreds to listen to the likes of me or Lorna Goodison from Jamaica or Chen Li from Taiwan or Haji Gora Haji from Zanzibar—such multitudes will be mentioned in our obituaries. “He once filled the Rotterdam City Theatre,” it will read, a tasteful dose of hyperbole, “with people hungry for his poems.” Lost to literary history will be the three Dubliners who turned out to Bewley’s in Grafton Street one Wednesday in October some years ago—my driver, “the events organizer” and one fetching young woman we took to be a discerning reader, but it turned out she was actually lost.
The same rule holds for funerals. Wherever two or three are gathered is enough to outnumber the dead guy. If one of them will stand up and hold forth, you’ve got all the ingredients you will ever need: someone who agrees to quit breathing, someone who cares, and someone who’s trying to make some sense of all of this. Half a dozen and they can carry the dead one to the final resting place. More than a hundred makes it an “exceptional tribute,” especially on a weekday when the weather is bad.
And though poetry and funerals have been around for a while, there’s the sense that their ancient forms may not be relevant to the postmodern, postindustrial, 24-7 televised news cycle of a deconstructed, digital world where everything is wired and managed by mouse-click and mass-marketed or geared to a niche or a focus group or a poll and anyone who wants to be one of the players better play by the numbers and compete for space and offend no one and appeal to a crowd and hold their attention, keep them entertained enough to keep them from changing channels, or keep them anesthetized enough so that they’ll think they’re getting something for their money, like these folks here in Reno, there at the two-for-one bar, and here at the sure-bet slots, and there at the all-you-can-eat buffet.
Last week in Rotterdam, for example, Poetry International was opened with a “Defense of Poetry”—a kind of keynote speech—by the Mongolian poet and shaman Galsan Tschinag, a Tuvan tribal chief. His native language having no script, he writes in German, which he learned in Leipzig. He sings in Tuvinian. His defense of poetry ran about an hour. Translations were available in booklets in the lobby afterward. Several dozen copies were given away. Everyone applauded and nodded and smiled.
Perhaps if they shot a poet, or hanged one, or banished one to some hinterland like they used to in the old days when language was dangerous and words were magic and poets weren’t tenured but they weren’t ignored, the attention and attendance would be better. The poems would reach a broader audience. Dead poets always fare better than live ones. Better yet if one was burned at the stake. At least the media would turn up for the show: the roving reporters, the poetry-cam, the talking heads to tell us what we heard and saw.
AND ONE OF the workshops here in Reno will certainly sound like a “Defense of Funerals.” Some Ph.D. or M.D. or M.S.W. will tell the F.D.’s all about the “Value of the Funeral.” Maybe if funerals hadn’t been so co-opted by the grief therapists and memorial counselors, the pie-in-the-skyers and casket peddlers; maybe if it was about more than our “feelings” or our “salvation” or our disposal. Maybe if funerals were a whole-being enterprise: something for our flesh and fears and faith and for the dead. If we burned them in public or buried them ourselves or bore them through town giving thanks and praise, making peace with the powers of God and Nature in carefully worded lamentations, incantations, benedictions, we would have to defend neither poetry nor funerals. We would simply do them whenever the spirits, the living or the dead ones, moved us to.
When, I wonder, do things become self-evident.
Poetry tunes our senses to the language. Without it how could we bear the Information Age and all its words, its lists of options, its multiple choices, its idiot menus from which we must make our selections? And funerals tune our s
enses to our mortal nature; like proper punctuation, whether we end with exclamation, questions or full stop, they lend meaning to our lives, our human being. Both press our attention to the existentials, the adverbials, the sensual and overwhelming questions, the mysteries and certainties of life and death.
Maybe it is because we have removed the poems and the corpses from our daily rounds. We are glad to have poets in the way we are glad to have good infrastructure. Smooth roads, clean drinking water, a sestina now and then—we are willing to pay the millage so that we can ignore them. We tuck them into universities with living wages and dental coverage and the captive audience of our sons and daughters. We are glad they are writing poems and gladder still that we needn’t read them. We give them grants and sabbaticals, a little airtime on the radio, a little shelf space in the corner of the megastore, and otherwise expect them to be still and disappear into the larger lifescapes of politics, history, events and entertainments, self-help and diet fads.
Much as we want the dead and dying to be still and disappear. Though we are drawn to the movies and the evening news with their murders and virtual blood and gore, and though the mort-cam is always at the ready to hover overhead the latest tragedy or terrorism; though prepackaged, media-approved, commercially viable opportunities abound for “national” mourning, surrogate sadnesses and remote-control grief, our locally dying and our local dead, our real-life family and friends, are, for the most part, disappeared—their bodies quickly hidden or disposed of in the name of efficiency and dignity, privacy and convenience. The actual, palpable, slowly decomposing and tangible facts of the matter are declared irrelevant, like good infrastructure, like poetry.
I REMEMBER THE first poem I ever heard, the first dead human body I ever saw. Neither scarred my psyche but each changed my life. Each gave it meaning by holding forth a mystery.
Angel of God, my guardian dear,
to whom God’s love commits me here,
ever this day be at my side
to light to guard to rule and guide.
My mother taught me to say this poem morning, noon and night. I hadn’t a clue what it meant exactly, but the jaunty progress toward its echoes pleased my ear. The sense that its syllables, the saying of them, held powerful medicine and protections proceeded from that pleasure, then as now.
The first dead person I remember seeing was an old man on the table of the embalming room at my father’s office. I was ten, I think, or thereabouts. My father had taken me to work with him on a Saturday. The embalming room was at the back of the old funeral home. We entered by the back door off the alley. I wasn’t told I was about to see a dead body or that it should do me any damage, or that there were any preparations I should make emotionally. I was only going to work with my father. I knew his work involved the dead as sons of doctors know their parents deal with sickness or the children of clergy have heard of sin, as every child is aware of sex—the idea of the thing but not the thing itself. I remember that the room smelled like the doctor’s office and the figure on the table was covered by a sheet except for his head, his face. The sheet was white, the table was white, the face was white and it was quiet. There was a stillness about that body unlike anything I’d witnessed in nature before. His head was bald, his eyes and mouth were closed, his nose was large, as were his earlobes. I asked my father what his name was, what his age was, what he died of and if he had children. And though I can’t remember the particulars, I remember that my father gave me answers. He also said that I should say a prayer. I wasn’t frightened but I was changed.
And sometimes I wonder what my life would have been if not for dead bodies and dead poets.
“When you are old and gray and full of sleep/and nodding by the fire take down this book . . .” William Butler Yeats wrote in his memorable pentameters to Maud Gonne, whom he loved and who wouldn’t have him a century ago. He had, in his youth, the certain sense that these lines and others like them would survive their youth, their age, their century. They have. The great Irish master bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with poetry of such power and appeal that instructions written but months before his death ring true and timely still:
Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top . . .
It is the meter and rhyme scheme of Yeats’s late poem that W. H. Auden, not quite thirty-two when Yeats died on January 28, 1939, echoed in his famous elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”:
Earth, receive an honored guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
I was among the fortunate hundreds who heard Seamus Heaney—one by whom the language lives—in Galway’s Town Hall Theatre a few Aprils ago during the Cuirt Festival of Literature. The Nobel laureate, noting this borrowing of Yeats’s meter and rhyme, paraphrased Auden to the effect that “poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.” And extending Auden’s metaphor, Heaney added, “If so, then surely rhyme and meter are the table manners.” He is, of course, correct.
Poetry is a kind of communion, the chore of ordinary talk made sacramental by the attention to what is memorable, transcendent, permanent, in the language. It is the common tongue by which the species remains connected to the past and bears its witness to the future. Each age offers variations on the themes of love and grief, reason and desire, prayer and homage, epic and elegy and honor. Some things are constantly changing. Some things never do. Poets and their poetry keep track of each.
But before it was a written and read thing, poetry was a spoken and said thing that happened in the ears and mouth before the eyes and intellect were engaged. It belonged to the body as much as the mind. It earned its place by pleasuring the senses. Before there were daily papers and news anchors and talking heads, there were bards who made their way from village to village bearing the news—Who was king in the next county; who stole whose cow; who slept with whose wife; who slaughtered whose son. And they were paid, well paid, to praise in verse a comely bride, a valiant warrior, a loyal dog; and paid to curse the blackguard, the enemy and the enemy’s gods. And all of this was done out loud—for the sound and sense of it—the way we sing in the shower, practice our proposals and listen for our own voice before we fall asleep at night. Rhyme and meter were tools of the trade, a way of making words memorable and memorizable, a pace tied to the footfall of the poets’ journeys.
We are drawn to the acoustic pleasures of poetry by nature and metabolism. Our hearts beat in iambs and trochees night and day. Our breath is caught between inspiration and expiration. Our pulse divided by our breathing equals the five-finger-tapping pentameters of Frost: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” And Shakespeare: “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes.” And Millay: “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why.” Is it any wonder that we know these things by heart?
Our first petitions are learned by rhyme and meter: “Now I lay me down to sleep/and pray the Lord my soul to keep.” Our first benedictions: “God is great, God is good/Let us thank Him for our food.” Our first mysteries: “Twinkle, twinkle, little star/How I wonder what you are.” Our first mastery: “A B C D E F G/H I J K lmno P.” Our first formula: “Red sky at morning/Sailor take warning/Red sky at night/Sailor’s delight.” Our first poem, memorized: “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright/In the forests of the night,/What immortal hand or eye?/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
If this meter of William Blake’s became Yeats’s late instruction to Irish poets, and later Auden’s elegy for Yeats, it s
erves as well for Seamus Heaney’s lament for Joseph Brodsky, the Russian exile and fellow Nobel laureate who learned to write in English and died too young on January 28, 1996. Giving his poems in Galway that spring, Heaney took up his place at the table of poets who will outlive their centuries. With impeccable manners and in a well-tested form, he paid his respects to his dead friend, to old masters and to their ancient craft in “Audenesque—In Memory of Joseph Brodsky.”
Joseph, yes, you know the beat.
Wystan Auden’s metric feet
Marched to it, unstressed and stressed,
Laying William Yeats to rest.
Therefore, Joseph, on this day,
Yeats’ anniversary,
(Double-crossed and death-marched date,
January twenty-eight),
Its measured ways I tread again
Quatrain by constrained quatrain,
Meting grief and reason out
As you said a poem ought.
Trochee, trochee, falling: thus
Grief and metre order us.
Repetition is the rule,
Spins on lines we learnt at school.
Heaney’s poem, which gathers power and sorrow for another dozen quatrains, will be part, no doubt, of a future collection. It is good to be alive while this man is writing. It is good to hear his voice in two millennia.