Tag: poetry of old age

Last Poems

In my old age, I am interested in those who have entered this territory before me.  I want to know what they were thinking as they approached the end of their lives.  I have always taken a lively interest in looking up how old a poet or novelist was when they produced a work I am impressed with (thank you Wikipedia!).  But I am especially keen to scout out last poems – particularly when the poet lived long.  Or at least to my age.

We do, of course, have the last poems of shorter-lived people like John Keats, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, or Rupert Brooke.   But I want to hear what poets have to say after a long life.  There are some collections to look at in this regard (like Harold Bloom’s Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems, which is excellent), but the real joy is to ferret them out yourselves.  If you have a beloved poet or novelist, read what they wrote in their old age.  I will discuss last novels in another blog, but last poems are interesting enough to keep you going for a while.

In fact, more than a few novelists turned to poetry in their old age. Thomas Hardy gave up writing novels after the bad reception of Jude the Obscure –  George Eliot  did the same thing when her reading public spurned the remarkable (and recommended) Daniel Deronda.  And there are some poets that turned to religion in their old age – T.S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Siegfried Sassoon come to mind.

But in looking at poets who have meant much to me over the years, I am particularly taken by those last poems that seem to say that, old and wise as they may have become, the poet has never found the answers – but seems to have found the ability to hold the unknown with great equanimity.  Denise Levertov’s final book of poetry (published after she died at age 74) is entitled The Great Unknowing: Last Poems.   The great unknowing…   And in it we find “Ancient Stairway”:

Footsteps like water hollow

the broad curves of stone

ascending, descending

century by century.

Who can say if the last

to climb these stairs

will be journeying

downward or upward?

“Who can say”?  Clearly no answers, but some comfort in the hollowing of footsteps.  I once worked at a college which occupied the old Springfield Armory buildings – in the wood floors were foot-shaped depressions where operators had stood at wood and metal lathes making rifles for decade after decade.  I would stand in those footprints and take a strange comfort in wondering about the dimensions of a life that went before me and in whose vacancy I was now abiding.

Among Robert Frost’s last poems is “In a Glass of Cider”:

It seemed I was a mite of sediment

That waited for the bottom to ferment

So I could catch a bubble in ascent.

I rode up on one till the bubble burst,

And when that left me to sink back reversed

I was no worse off than I was at first.

I’d catch another bubble if I waited.

The thing was to get now and then elated.

Frost is not wondering about whether we are ascending or descending, he is sure we are doing both all of the time, and only hopes that we “get now and then elated.”  There are no answers for Frost either, as noted in a couplet he wrote in his old age entitled “An Answer”:

But Islands of the Blessèd, bless you, son,

I never came upon a blessèd one.

 

This, by the way, is not a new sentiment in old age for Frost – you will find it again and again in his early poetry (e.g. “Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length”).  In the very first poem in his very first volume (“Into My Own”), he warns us that if we tracked him down after many years:

                                    They would not find me changed from him they knew –

                                    Only more sure of all I thought was true.

And then we have Thomas Hardy, another poet who says, at the end, that his views of life have not changed much.  He gives us  a poem (“He Never Expected Much”) on the occasion of his eighty-sixth birthday.  (Hardy died at 87.)   Here it is:

Well, World, you have kept faith with me,

Kept faith with me;

Upon the whole you have proved to be

Much as you said you were.

Since as a child I used to lie

Upon the leaze and watch the sky,

Never, I own, expected I

That life would all be fair.

 

‘Twas then you said, and since have said,

Times since have said,

In that mysterious voice you shed

From clouds and hills around:

“Many have loved me desperately,

Many with smooth serenity,

While some have shown contempt of me

Till they dropped underground.

 

“I do not promise overmuch,

Child; overmuch;

Just neutral-tinted haps and such,”

You said to minds like mine.

Wise warning for your credit’s sake!

Which I for one failed not to take,

And hence could stem such strain and ache

As each year might assign.

But, please look up the last poems of your favorite poet. And if you are interested in reading more about the poetry of age, you can read this prior blog post and look at my ever-growing list of poems about old age. Meanwhile, here again is “Last Things,” a story I wrote a few years ago when I was pondering what to make of the end of things.

The Poetry of Old Age

On the topic of aging, I most trust poets who are old. Some poets –like Frost and Yeats – wrote poetry throughout a long life. Some turned to poetry in their old age. Thomas Hardy published his first volume of poetry at age fifty-eight and apparently wrote nothing but poetry for the next thirty years. I think poetry lends itself to the old mind, both in the writing and the reading. Good spirits must be distilled.

There are various types of poetry about old age. There is serious poetry and silly poetry. There are elegies for what has been and odes to the joys of senescence. There are genres and tropes. There have been more than a few poems about glimpsing one’s own aging façade in the bathroom mirror – one thinks of Hardy’s “I Look Into My Glass” or Robert Graves’ “The Face in the Mirror.” There are poems of return to places of one’s youth and reminiscences of lost loves. (Yeats is good at this.) Poignant poems capture the difficulties and loneliness of old age. There are no more affecting lines than the end of Frost’s “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” Other poems are filled with the realization that life is going to go on without us, as in Housman’s “Tell Me Not Here.”

Then there are the losses – which some poets see as a mixed blessing. There is the loss of memory. In “The Winter Palace,” Larkin writes that “Some people know more as they get older, /I give all that the cold shoulder.” There is the loss of those we love, as in  Auden’s “Funeral Blues.” And the prospect of our own death, which for some is fearsome (mostly for the younger ones – Dylan Thomas was only thirty-three when he wrote “Do Not Gentle”), for others is welcome (Stevie Smith’s magnificent “Black March” or Auden’s “A Lullaby”). For some the final event is imagined – we hear and see the deathbed scene in Dickinson’s “I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died.”

As I read poetry or novels, I note the age of the poet/author at the time of composition. This is easier in older volumes wherein the date of birth of the author appear on the back of the title page in the Library of Congress information (why did they stop?), but there is always Wikipedia. I find it particularly interesting to read works of poets at about my own age. The human experience is not entirely singular; there are correspondences. And differences.

I read poetry about old age to learn about myself. Poets can put into language what I often cannot. If I cannot speak it, if I cannot even think it coherently, I cannot truly comprehend it. E.M. Forster asked, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” Flannery O’Connor said, ““I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” I read poetry about old age to give me words for what I am feeling. To give me courage. And sometimes for comfort.

I have attached a list in progress of some poems about aging that are worth looking at. In addition, as I have noted before, there is a wonderful collection by Harold Bloom entitled: Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems. There is also The Art of Growing Older by Wayne Boothe which gathers poems and other literature about aging into categories. Part of my daily reading for years has been in the Poem A Day books – there are three volumes. The original volume was compiled as a project for The Natural Death Centre in Great Britain, and many of the poems address old age, loss, and death. Many of them also express and bring joy. I will add to my list of old age poems as more come to mind or are discovered; I encourage readers to send me their own favorites. In this business of being on the downside of life’s parabola, we all need comfort, companionship, and a marked-up map.

So what is my favorite poem about aging? I am tempted to cite Frost’s two-liner, written in his eighties:

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.

But no. My choice (at least for today) is from A. E. Housman’s volume Last Poems. Housman published only two volumes of poetry in his lifetime – one at age thirty-seven (A Shropshire Lad) and Last Poems at age sixty-three. I own a first U.S. edition of the latter, and it is a treasured possession. On page 60 is the following poem:

XXXV
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.

If you are interested in poems about old age, you might also look at my post about last poems here.