Dying Modern

a meditation on elegy

By Diana Fuss

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5375-1

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………ixIntroduction………………………………………………………11. Dying … Words…………………………………………………92. Reviving … Corpses…………………………………………….443. Surviving … Lovers…………………………………………….78Notes…………………………………………………………….113Bibliography………………………………………………………131Index…………………………………………………………….141Copyright Acknowledgments…………………………………………..149

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Dying … Words

“Suppose you are on your deathbed,” the poet C. Day-Lewis pondersin a poem titled “Last Words”: “with what definitive sentence willyou sum / And end your being?” Betting that the premature deathbedspeech is “just the game for a man of words,” Day-Lewis’s questionstands as a provocation, both to himself and to other poets,who find themselves attracted by the idea of authoring a death,even and especially their own. But can any life be summarizedand ended in a single definitive sentence? And if not, why arepoets repeatedly drawn to the precise moment beyond which languageis no longer possible? Pushing voice to its furthest limit,what exactly do poets hope to learn by imagining, and reimagining,the dying hour?

What follows are my first thoughts on last words, inspired bymore than two centuries of British and American poems that takeas their central subject the dying words or speeches of the unhappilycondemned, mortally ill, or piously prepared. Last-wordpoems can be found in ballads and sonnets, parlor poetry and politicalpoetry, dramatic monologues and poetic dialogues, and elegiesand epitaphs. As a group they transcend the formal propertiesof any one poetic type, sharing instead a single thematic preoccupation:the challenge of dying a linguistically meaningful death.Last words are, at base, a specifically literary problem. Whetherwritten or oral, the question remains the same: What words arethe right words for one’s final conscious moments?

poetry

Many literary genres are fascinated by the drama of the deathbedand the power of last words. Early nineteenth-century Evangelicalrevivals produced a host of religious tracts, mourning manuals,published sermons, popular magazines, and fictional works, allof which idealized the power of dying words to ensure a good deathand an even happier afterlife. Across a range of genres, deathbedscenes invariably incorporate what the historian Pat Jalland identifiesas the central distinguishing features of an Evangelical gooddeath: a slow, painful but fully conscious demise, borne with greatfortitude and equanimity by the dying, who, in their final hour,dispense farewells and blessings to attentive family and friends.In a good death, the dying offer proof of salvation through wordsof contrition, confession, conversion, faith, forgiveness, wisdom,or grace. Informed by three centuries of ars moriendi literature,Victorians in particular valued last words for the spiritual, social,and familial functions they could perform: saving one’s soul, settlingone’s affairs, leaving one’s legacy, instructing one’s heirs,planning one’s funeral, and consoling one’s family and friends.Yet actual deathbed scenes rarely approximated the idealizedversion promoted by didactic deathbed literature. Recordings offamily deaths, in diaries and letters, suggest that “holy dying” wasextremely difficult to achieve in practice, with most private reportsof the deathbed recording “bland or banal” last words, if suchwords are recorded at all. Dying words of any kind are, in fact,hard to find in an age when newly discovered narcotics like morphine,chloroform, and ether made speech itself an unlikely eventin one’s dying days.

More than any other literary genre, however, poetry playedan especially central role in Protestant death chambers, at oncepromoting the ideal of a good death and compensating for its absence.At the Victorian deathbed, relatives frequently read aloudpoems, hymns, or favorite scriptural passages, made readily availablein collections for the sick and suffering. Popular bedside companionscompiled for both the dying and their watchers, like MaryTileston’s Sursum Corda or Priscilla Maurice’s Prayers for the Sickand Dying, include entire sections of poems “Suitable to be readto Persons in their Last Hours.” These books not only arm the sickwith edifying verses on how to die well, they also provide deathbedattendants with exact instructions on how best to read the poemsaloud (“very slowly, distinctly, with intervals; not in a whisper orin a loud voice, but clearly and calmly”). Because the Evangelicalmodel of a good death required words of uplift, poems were oftenat the ready to provide meaningful last words when the dying wereunable to do so themselves. Consolation poetry was not just a postmortemgenre. Its powers of consolation extended to the act ofdying itself, providing final words of solace both to watchers andtheir dying charge when the requirements of a good death threatenedto fall distressingly beyond their grasp.

For the British vicar and Oxford Chair of Poetry John Keble,the source of poetry’s special powers of consolation lies in its twomost distinctive formal properties: rhythm and rhyme. Author ofThe Christian Year (1827), the nineteenth century’s most popularvolume of poetry, Keble believed that only the controlling powerof versification can “regulate and restrain” strong emotions likemourning. While today we tend to view the whole body of Victorianconsolation poetry as an extravagant overindulgence of grief,at the time such verse was believed to achieve the very opposite, relievingminds overpowered by strong emotion. “The sigh of poesysteals without startling,” explains Lydia Sigourney, nineteenth-centuryAmerica’s most celebrated poet of mourning. Consolationwriters on both sides of the Atlantic identified poetry as the mostappropriate literary genre for the death chamber, finding versificationalone subtle and harmonious enough not to interrupt eitherthe dying or the mourner’s “season of solitude.”

Of the hundreds of verses that might be readily categorized aslast-word poems, roughly half are traditional elegies, commemoratinganother’s memorable or untimely passing, while the otherhalf are self-elegies, memorializing the poet’s own future death.Last-word poems thus look either backward or forward, capturingthe dual temporality of the deathbed itself, poised on the thresholdbetween two worlds. If poets are repeatedly drawn to the deathbed,and to the scene of love and loss enacted there, it may well bebecause the promise of an all-seeing “dying eye” conveys preciselythe kind of privileged vantage point that poets themselves striveto attain in their writing. Belief in the revelation of life’s mysterieson the deathbed as well as faith in the unlimited insight of thedying hour mark poetry’s own claim to otherworldly or expandedvision, elevating the deathbed itself to the status of a living poem.

In this chapter I map the richness of an unsung elegiac traditionof last-word poems and simultaneously examine the problem “lastness”poses for poetry. I end my consideration of the dying voicewith a discussion of the significance of last words for poetry itself,a literary form fundamentally concerned not only with words thatcome last but with words that will always last. But first, I surveyfour main types of last-word poems: the consoling last word,the defiant last word, the banal last word, and the new last word.These many variations on the dying voice suggest that poetry’s”last words” comprise a dynamic literary convention evolving intandem with changing cultural attitudes toward the deathbed. If inthe beginning a poet’s primary ethical responsibility is to preservewords that may otherwise be lost, in the end a poet’s central obligationis to provide words that may never have been left. In eithercase, last words remain, for minor and major poets alike, emblematicof the very medium of poetry, a genre preoccupied, perhapsmore than any other, with the power and finitude of voice.

consolation

As Evangelical literature promoting exemplary Christian deathsbegan to proliferate in the nineteenth century, so, too, did thepoetry of last words. One need look no farther than devotionalpoetry published by ministers to find last-word poems uncriticallyperpetuating the fiction of a good death. Henry Ware’s “Seasons ofPrayer,” a favorite consolation poem from The American CommonplaceBook of Poetry (1831), offers deathbed watchers advice on howprayer might be used to “strengthen the perilous hour”:

Kneel down by the dying sinner’s side,And pray for his soul for him who died.Large drops of anguish are thick on his brow—O, what is earth and its pleasures now!And what shall assuage his dark despair,But the penitent cry of humble prayer?

Kneel down at the couch of departing faith,And hear the last words the believer saith.He has bidden adieu to his earthly friends;There is peace in his eye that upwards bends;There is peace in his calm, confiding air;For his last thoughts are God’s, his last words prayer.

Ware, a leading Unitarian minister, explains to his flock that thewatcher’s responsibility differs according to the disposition of thedying: with the believer, the watcher receives the prayer and learnsby example how to die a good death; with the sinner, the watcheris the one who prays, lessening the sinner’s despair by petitioningGod on his or her behalf. Last words are not always the province ofthe dying; they can be shared or even shouldered, taken on by thevoice of another in the very act of intercessory prayer so stronglyrecommended by the Ars moriendi.

Last-word poems spoken in the first person operate as a form ofventriloquism, with poets often assuming dying personas in orderto imagine their own final moments on earth. Such literary exercisesin premature dying may themselves represent attempts tospiritually prepare for death, especially in an age when the faithfulwere persistently encouraged to imagine their own “perilous hour.”These premortem first-person consolation poems, frequentlytitled “Last Words,” routinely adopt the voice of Ware’s departingbeliever, bidding farewell to “earthly friends” as the “eye upwardsbends.” Thomas Westwood, a minor British poet and a contemporaryof Tennyson, imagines as a young man what he might say onhis deathbed to his sister, whom he envisions weeping and “watchingthro’ the long night hours, / By a sick brother’s bed”:

Weep not for me! soon, soon the weary oneWill be at rest, his throbbing pulses stilled,His spirit free.—E’en now methinks I hearSounds that are not of earth, the solemn tonesOf our home’s parted band, that seem to callTheir child away.—Oh! Do not mourn beloved,Too long and bitterly when I am gone,And doubt not we shall meet in that bright world,Beyond the grave.

Westwood’s “Last Words” incorporates all the conventions ofnineteenth-century consolation literature: a dying hour, a faithfulwatcher, a prepared speaker, and a promised family reunion inHeaven. The poet’s projected last words—”Farewell! farewell!”—echothe simple “adieu!” of Ware’s exemplary Christian death. Intheir sustained focus on not just the dying speaker but his attentiveaudience, these representative lyrics highlight the most fundamentalfeature of the last-word poem: its irreducible sociality.

Last-word poems seek to shore up social and familial relationsat the very moment of their irrevocable loss. The poet achieves thisparadox through a subtle manipulation of audience, doubling thepoem’s point of address. Helen Vendler has identified two mainforms of address in lyric poetry: the horizontal (lyrics addressed toan immediate human audience) and the vertical (lyrics addressedto a distant divine audience). Last-word poems are horizontaland vertical at once. With their final words, the dying console thebereaved but always with an eye toward Heaven. Seeking to bridgethe seen and the unseen, the poetic rehearsal of last words is consciousfrom the beginning of its dual audience and purpose: thehuman audience that must be consoled and the divine audiencethat must be convinced.

Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Last Words” (1881) is a master of the dualaudience address. In this commanding speech from the deathbed,written four years before her actual death, Jackson wagers that agracious final farewell to family and friends may in fact be the bestway to prove her soul’s sanctity to God:

Dear hearts, whose love has been so sweet to know,That I am looking backward as I go,Am lingering while I haste, and in this rainOf tears of joy am mingling tears of pain;Do not adorn with costly shrub, or tree,Or flower, the little grave which shelters me.Let the wild wind-sown seeds grow up unharmed,And back and forth all summer, unalarmed,Let all the tiny, busy creatures creep;Let the sweet grass its last year’s tangles keep;And when, remembering me, you come some dayAnd stand there, speak no praise, but only say,”How she loved us! ‘Twas that which made her dear!”Those are the words that I shall joy to hear.

Embedding the vertical address within the horizontal, Jacksonlooks forward and backward, demonstrating to her audiences bothnear and far that she is that very sentimentalist embodiment offemale virtue: a woman both loving and beloved. If the centralcondition of dying well is to approach death gladly and willingly,with a pure heart and a clean conscience, then Jackson, by her owntestimony, is on the fast track to Heaven.

To modern ears, Jackson’s boastful modesty sounds presumptuous,self-satisfied, and not a little controlling. The sonnet’s inflexiblemeter, tightly rhymed couplets, and heavy use of imperativesdepict a woman determined to master every detail of her ownmemorialization, from the tending of her grave to the words spokenover it. Significantly, there are many more last-word consolationpoems by women than by men, a gender imbalance thatcan be attributed not merely to women’s socially sanctioned roleas ideal mourners but to the freedom the deathbed provides towomen to finally speak their minds. The deathbed, historians nowrecognize, is one of the few areas where a woman’s words have nothistorically been devalued. By artfully assuming the empoweredposition of a woman on her deathbed, Jackson forbids her mournersfrom engaging in the traditional elegiac consolations of adorninga grave or praising the dead, and instead she demands fromthem in death something she may only have dreamt of in life: thefulfillment of her every last wish.

Last words are, in the nineteenth century especially, a powerfulplatform for many of the socially and politically disenfranchised.In her poem “Last Words of an Indian Chief,” Lydia Sigourneyadopts a dying voice not her own in order to protest more effectivelythe massacre of Native Americans:

Hear my last bidding, friends! Lay not my bonesNear any white man’s bones. Let not his handTouch my clay pillow, nor his hateful voiceSing burial hymns for me. Rather than dwellIn Paradise with him, my soul would chooseEternal darkness and the undying worm.Ho! heed my words, or else my wandering shadeShall haunt ye with its curse!

Professing the government’s displacement of Native Americansas “one of our greatest national sins,” Sigourney narrates the consequencesof America’s immoral actions by drawing on three relatedtraditions: the romantic literary tradition of the noble savage’spower of oratory, the dramatic stage tradition of the redman’s curse on the white man, and the religious missionary traditionof the Indian saint’s dying speech. To express her strongopposition to the violent appropriation of the unnamed Senecanchief’s land, Sigourney ironically finds herself occupying his voice,his thoughts, and indeed his very interiority. Imagining the proud”pagan” chief’s indignity at being memorialized by a white burialhymn, Sigourney’s lyric ventriloquism paradoxically constitutesprecisely such a tribute: a burial hymn like so many others in theChristian tradition, memorializing the noble last words of the martyreddead.

The African American poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harperalso turns to the device of the deathbed speech to lend politicalurgency to the most famous of her many last-word poems, “BuryMe in a Free Land.” Part of a larger group of nineteenth-centurylast-word poems that might be labeled the “bury me/bury me not”tradition, Harper’s impassioned call, “bury me in a free land,” galvanizesher audience by summoning the considerable moral authorityaccorded to the deathbed wish.

Make me a grave where’er you will,In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill,Make it among earth’s humblest graves,But not in a land where men are slaves.

Unlike Sigourney’s political last-word poem, Harper’s abolitionistlyric—which rhymes “will” with “hill” and “graves” with “slaves”—worksnot by concealing an ideological contradiction but by disclosingone. In Shira Wolosky’s concise summary, “the land of thefree is exposed as the home of slaves, and liberty comes to thedead, not the living.” And yet it may be truer to say that eventhe dead cannot rest easy until slavery has been eradicated. In aslave nation, the poet implies, no one dies a good death.
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