Tag: Elder Statesman

Dayspring Mishandled – “Remember Not the Sins of My Youth”

“Dayspring Mishandled” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, and is also a phrase in a pseudo-Chaucer poem (“Gertrude’s Prayer”) that Kipling wrote to go with that tale.  The first stanza of that poem is as follows:

That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,
Nor water out of bitter well make clean;
All evil thing returneth at the end,
Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.
Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine—
Dayspring mishandled cometh not agen.

Dayspring is an old word for dawn, for the early part of the day, and Kipling’s point is that things we did, mistakes we made, in our early life cannot be corrected and may have consequences for the rest of our life.  This is both a fairly negative attitude and perhaps also a fairly true one.  How unfair it seems that decisions that we made when we were nineteen about marriage or education or conduct should have repercussions for the rest of our lives!  “Remember not the sins of my youth,” cries the 25th Psalm.  The Psalmist is talking to God, but he might as well have been talking to himself.  Who wouldn’t want to forget the transgressions of their youth?  Who can?

There are two kinds of “dayspring mishandled” that bother us, I think, as we look back from our old age.  First, we acknowledge missed chances, like not taking full advantage of our educational opportunities.  Regrets like these are ours alone, and we can usually remediate, atone, or come to peace in some way within ourselves.  Second, there is the guilt of doing things (or not doing them) that affect other people as well as ourselves.  This is a harder kind of remorse – even if we felt that we had no choice (if we wanted to survive) when we did whatever caused the pain.  Nevertheless, parents, children, spouses, friends – suffered.  I have always taken some solace from the words of Mary Oliver:

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Of course, Mary Oliver had no children.  Your children live longer than you do, and they never forget.

Literature has often addressed this idea of coming to terms with “dayspring mishandled;” one thinks of Oedipus the King or Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. Of special interest in this regard are works written by older authors, who are looking back at a long past. I recently reread T.S. Eliot’s play The Elder Statesman, his last major work, written when he was seventy and about six years before his death.  It is all about the mistakes of youth – and how they can destroy the rest of life if left to fester.  Lord Claverton (the elder statesman) laments:

Those who flee from their past will always lose the race,

I know this from experience.  When you reach your goal,

 Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,

 You will find your past failure waiting there to greet you.

And yet, Eliot gives us a relatively happy ending.  Old Lord Calverton ends up in a rest home full of people who know the secrets he has tried to keep hidden for so many years.  The secrets come out, the children forgive, and the old man dies in peace: “I’ve been freed from the self that pretends to be someone;/In becoming no one, I begin to live. /It is worth dying, to find out what life is.”  I recommend The Elder Statesman; I think Eliot learned much between “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and his last play.

We would like to forget our instances of dayspring mishandled, but we cannot.  Not only are the consequences very real, but as the wonderful Haruki Murakami says, “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them. If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.” Ah, yes.  Not easy.  But is it at least worth hanging the dirty laundry on the line with the hope that, after all these years, sun and time will bleach out the stains?

Like all of us, I have my share of regrets, of daysprings mishandled.  Besides acceptance (easily said, nearly impossible to live), the thing that helps me is to remember that dayspring is something that happens every morning.  Each day we get a new chance and an older and wiser self with which to face the challenges and the gifts.

I am not going be specific about my regrets here. But I have often written fiction about people who are trying to realize the “ideal” of the poet James Fenton:

This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.

Since it is Lent, you might look at my story, “Shrove Tuesday.”

The Drama of Old Age – Eliot’s The Elder Statesman

 

I have written about last poems, last novels, and now a last play.  There are many wonderful last plays, many of them directly relating to old age.  T.S. Eliot wrote The Elder Statesman in 1958 when he was about 70; I first read it when I was in my 50s, then again at 63, and now as I am about to turn 70 myself.  It is both a heartening and scary play.  On the plus side, Eliot uses the word love more in this play than in all his other drama combined; on the scary side, imagine arriving at the nursing home only to find it populated by all the people you have wronged in life, all the people who know your darkest secrets.

Eliot stated that he partially based his play on another play by an even older playwright.  Sophocles wrote Oedipus at Colonus when he was about 90.  Cicero tells a story about how Sophocles’ sons were not happy at how their elderly father was handling the family fortune.  They took him to court for incompetence and Sophocles defended himself by reading from Colonus.  So much for the sons.  But Elder Statesman is not a rewrite of Sophocles; it feels deeply personal.  One cannot help remembering that Eliot and his brother-in-law had locked his first wife away in an insane asylum; she had died there ten years before this play was written.  And here we have a play about the problems of the past, how to deal with regret for things that cannot be changed.  Any old person knows about this.

Much of Eliot’s late writing is religious (or spiritual) in nature, but there is no religion in Elder Statesman.  The protagonist, Lord Claverton, has just retired due to a failing heart and is facing the first period in his life with an empty appointment book.  He has a loving daughter and a renegade son.  And time to think.  But he does not have to dredge up his old sins; they come knocking on the door.  The youthful joyride where he ran over someone, the inappropriate love match that he let his father buy off, the younger friend whom he betrayed.  For most of us, these kinds of past sin just reside at the bottom of our consciousness; Eliot has them come to call.  The question to be answered is what to do about our past sins, our inner critic:

What is this self inside us, this silent observer,

Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us

And urge us on to futile activity,

And in the end, judge us more severely

For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us.

One of the things we sometimes do with our own faults is to project them on our children.  Lord Claverton does this with his son  Michael – always fearful that Michael has gotten into trouble with some woman or hurt someone while driving his sports car.  In the end, however, he realizes that the only lesson both he and his son have to learn is not to try to escape their responsibilities, the consequences of their own actions:

Come, I’ll start to learn again,

Michael and I shall go to school together.

We’ll sit side by side, at little desks

And suffer the same humiliations

At the hands of the same master.  But have I still time?

There is time for Michael.  Is it too late for me, Monica [his daughter]?

Is it too late?  The call, the question, the entreaty, the petition of the old – can I undo, can I atone, can I make restitution, can I learn the lesson?  This is a play and so the old man does learn a lesson and that lesson involves love – a very human kind of love.  Confession, yes, but not necessarily to a priest:

If a man has one person, just one in his life,

To whom he is willing to confess everything –

And that includes, mind you, not only things criminal,

Not only turpitude, meanness and cowardice,

But also situations which are simply ridiculous,

When he has played the fool (and who has not?) –

Then he loves that person and love will save him.

We all hope to be fortunate enough to have that person, to find that person.  For Claverton, it is his daughter.  But one has to be willing to confess.  In Colonus, Oedipus dies claiming he was not fully responsible for what happened to him and his family.  There surely is a sense in which our fates are ordained by circumstances – but almost never completely.  Oedipus says that old age teaches him acceptance:  “My experience and my length of days teach me to be content.”  I hope your old age has brought you acceptance and contentment.  If not, read The Elder Statesman and think about who you might not want to encounter in the rest home of your final years. 

Also, for a story about dealing with the sins of the past, try my story “Shrove Tuesday;” for more on T.S. Eliot, you might look at my blog from a year ago, “Eliot’s Gifts of Old Age.”