{"id":2336,"date":"2016-01-19T14:28:55","date_gmt":"2016-01-19T14:28:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=2336"},"modified":"2025-12-27T13:33:37","modified_gmt":"2025-12-27T13:33:37","slug":"poetry-helps-us-face-facts-of-lifeand-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2016\/01\/poetry-helps-us-face-facts-of-lifeand-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry helps us face facts of life \u2026 and death"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Among all the tributes to David Bowie last week, the lines that stayed in my mind were by the man himself, written and sung with the carefree insight of youth.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Turn and face the strange,
\nCh-ch-changes,
\nOh look out now you rock and rollers,
\nPretty soon now you\u2019re gonna get older.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

With Changes<\/a>, Bowie\u2019s 1972 hit, the 25-year-old rising star acknowledged one unavoidable fact of life: unless, like Hendrix, you die young, old age will claim you. Not many years earlier, The Who sang for My Generation<\/a>: “I hope I die before I get old\u201d(and drummer Keith Moon managed it). Bowie was more philosophical perhaps. Confronting the realization that life is finite, he told the BBC in 2002<\/a>: \u201cYou must realise, though, ageing doesn\u2019t faze me at all. It\u2019s the death part that\u2019s really a drag\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Death came last week and with it \u2013 for fans across the world \u2013 the shock discovery that David Bowie, the master of self-invention, was not only capable of growing older, he was mortal too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Alan Rickman died two days later, also from cancer \u2013  both of them following just three weeks after Motorhead’s Lemmy \u2013 social media marked the passing of these three with a curious meme: a defiant finger raised to cancer. Angry tweets and Facebook postings seemed to show incredulous rage that such celebrated souls could succumb to something so mundane (although the disease in its many forms visits one in two of us<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seemed as if the selfie generation had suddenly come face to face with hard facts of life. Amid a mass outpouring of grief, another tweet brought wry hope:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“We\u2019re all going to die and poetry helps us live with that.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Was it coincidence that @DesKellyOBE of the National Care Forum chose last week to recycle Why People Need Poetry<\/a> a 2013 TEDGlobal talk from Edinburgh? If not coincidence, it was a clever choice. Stephen Burt, American literary critic, scholar, sci-fi fan and cross-dresser is, as the New York Times<\/a> describes him: \u201cthe critic who, more than any other, understands the here and now and flourishes amid the hipsters and the sonneteers.\u201d He is also a performer and, as poet Albert Goldbarth observes in the same article, \u201cthere must be a kind of bonding between that interest in his own life\u201d \u2014 cross-dressing \u2014 \u201cand the idea of costuming, with different identities, that we find in the superhero universe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our earthly here and now, Burt has written, \u2018self-fashioned\u2019 photogenic figures like David Bowie, epitomise “the presentation of what and who you are\u2026something you created (with help) in order to make your way in the world.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet poetry, Burt\u2019s TED talk contends, helps us to enjoy being mortal. \u201cPoetry makes me want to be alive,” he says, “Poems made me happier and sadder and more alive.\u201d Even, especially, while contemplating death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ye olde grim reaper<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are plenty of poems about death. Search the PoemHunter<\/a> and you find a daunting list. Some, like John Donne\u2019s Death Be Not Proud<\/a>, chide the grim reaper, raising (perhaps) a 16th<\/sup> century version of that tweeted finger,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
\nAnd dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
\nAnd poppy or charms can make us sleep as well<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Others (not on PoemHunter) are deeply personal, like Thomas Hardy\u2019s poems written after the death of his wife Emma. His coming to terms with grief and loss poignantly produced what critics regard his best work \u2013 and (for me) comfort in the certainty that he had lived and loved.  At Castle Boterel<\/a> the poet retraces the path he took with Emma many years earlier:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
\nAnd much have they faced there, first and last,
\nOf the transitory in Earth’s long order’
\nBut what they record in colour and cast
\nIs \u2013 that we two passed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In Burt\u2019s eclectic selection death is not always explicit. Poetry is where we can go when we want to remember “someone or something, to look beyond death, to say goodbye.” He begins with A E Housman\u2019s From Far, From Eve and Morning<\/a>, which has inspired several sci-fi book titles:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Speak now and I will answer;
\nHow shall I help you, say;
\nEre to the wind\u2019s twelve quarters
\nI take my endless way.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And, in contrast, the more elusive contemporary \u2018language poetry\u2019 of  Rae Armentrout<\/a>, whose The Garden starts with Oleander and lipstick ads from the 1950s. \u201cIt\u2019s about the Garden of Eden,” Burt explains,  “and the biblical story of the Fall, in which sex as we know it and death and guilt come into the world at the same time.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bowie’s enigmatic last works, Lazarus and Blackstar, may well demand his attention too. So I see a whimsical fit with Burt\u2019s last 2013 TED choice. John Keat\u2019s \u2018mysterious\u2019 unfinished work, This Living Hand, reaches towards the living from beyond the grave. Not Lazarus but with a firm grasp of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This living hand, now warm and capable
\nOf earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
\nAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,
\nSo haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
\nThat thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
\nSo in my veins red life might stream again,
\nAnd thou be conscience-calm\u2019d \u2014 see here it is \u2014
\nI hold it towards you.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n