“Last things” can be hard to talk about. We formulate bucket lists of fun and daring things we want to do before we die; generally, though, we assume those are one-time activities. Just to see the Taj Mahal once, to feel what it is like to jump out of an airplane. We assume the first time is the last time. But what about the things we do all the time? Will we even know when we are doing things for the last time? Most of us remember when we got a driver’s license and took a car out alone for the first time, but will we even know when we make that last trip at the steering wheel? And surely, we have often had the death of a friend or loved one creep up on us unaware, and never realized that our last dinner with them was the “last” time we would see them.
Christianity says there are four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell. We give the dying faithful last rites, and we recall the last supper. Taverns have a last call – which Leonard Cohen used metaphorically in his wonderful “Closing Time.”
Rarely do artists admit that they have completed their last works, but there have been some exceptions. A .E. Housman had a great success in his thirties with A Shropshire Lad, then did not publish much until Last Poems in his sixties. The latter is not much read, and many of the poems in it are unpublished poems of his younger days. But this is one of my favorites in this volume from his later years:
When first my way to fair I took
Few pence in purse had I,
And long I used to stand and look
At things I could not buy.
Now times are altered: if I care
To buy a thing, I can;
The pence are here and here’s the fair,
But where’s the lost young man?
– – To think that two and two are four
And neither five nor three
The heart of man has long been sore
And long ’tis like to be.
This poem is a poem of endings, and our inability to make sense of it all. Housman was forthright in the introduction to Last Poems; he was done. Housman wrote:
I publish these poems, few though they are, because it is not likely that I shall ever be impelled to write much more. I can no longer expect to be revisited by the continuous excitement under which in the early months of 1895 I wrote the greater part of my first book, nor indeed could I well sustain it if it came; and it is best that what I have written should be printed while I am here to see it through the press and control its spelling and punctuation.
No one wants to think about last things, but we might be happier if we did. In fact, Housman did write one or two poems after he announced his retirement from the genre (he continued to work on his Latin scholarship). Would it take the pressure off all of us if we admitted it was time for some “last” things – not in a pessimistic sort of way, but in a “goodbye to all that” kind of way? I had a friend once who – being an ambitious type – was always being tempted into new projects in her retirement. She put a sign across the top of her computer screen which said, “You’ve already done all of that!”
Harold Bloom compiled a wonderful collection of what he calls A Gathering of Last Poems (highly recommended). Some have the tone of being final but are not really the last; others were written just days before the poet’s passing. I especially relished his commentary on Auden’s Aubade. And there is the “Last Poem” of F. T. Prince which tells us that standing at the grave of “any common man or woman,” their “life becomes a poem.” Yes.
Ah, but… Yeats last poem was called “Politics,” but it was about anything but politics and about anything but acceptance and reconciliation with age:
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.
One last thought. I recently read the advice (in What Matters Most by Jim Manney) that we should compose a reverse bucket list – a list of all the things we can jettison from our lives, that we can resolve to have done for the last time. This makes perfect sense to me. Old age should be a stripping down.
I’ve written on this subject before (see the post, “A Diminished Thing”) and have posted one short story that captures an attempt to do this, “Nothing New.” What, in your life, have you done for the last time? What are you willing to say good-bye to before it is wrested from your arms?
When I Come To Be Old 