Dear SunWinkers!

Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.

            Shakespeare, Macbeth

 

I find myself being rather emotional these days. Last week, I spent four days in bed with the chest flu. This sort of inactivity and helplessness is very problematical for me as a trigger for depression. After another week, I’m still not my better self in terms of energy and industry.

Add to this…

• A steady stream of paying work has unexpectedly evaporated. Not the end of the world, there will be lots of others, but the idleness and uncertainty doesn’t help my mood…
• Carol and I had a lovely overnight at the beach last Saturday, but now it’s over…
• And finally, my 16 ½-year-old cat Serafina has developed an ugly tumor the size of a shelled filbert underneath her eye. So I find myself confronted with intimations of Serafina’s mortality, which are also reverberating with the emotions of burying my father last fall after a protracted and contentious decline.

So this week’s SunWinks! prompt is, unusually, not about a technical point, it’s about a subject, namely death.

Death of course is an apt and frequent subject for poets, for the obvious reason that it triggers lots of emotions that are particularly hard to understand. I wrote many poems about my father in the last couple years.

Here’s the thing I want to say about poetry: for me, poetry isn’t just an outlet for self-expression. It’s a way to process and understand emotions. It’s like therapeutic painting in that respect. The beauty of poetry is that (forget Milton and Coleridge for the moment) it is concentrated on small fragments of thought, small pieces of the existential puzzle, small moments, tentative insights, fleeting images, and embryonic revelations. I don’t have to have a complete handle on or know securely what I think about something to write a poem about it. The best poetry asks questions and raises more questions.

Most of the following examples approach the subject from oblique angles, with unexpected images, very often taking a muted and understated tone, and concentrating on a tiny piece of the overall picture.

“The Bustle in a House” by Emily Dickinson

“Because I could not stop for death” by Emily Dickinson

“Michiko Dead” by Jack Gilbert

“Elegy for Jane” by Theodore Roethke

“Wake” by Tess Gallagher 

“Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath

“The Term” by William Carlos Williams

“Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford

The Prompt

Read the examples.

Write a short essay about the death of someone close to you (relative, friend, pet, or particularly beloved public figure). Explore your feelings about the meaning of this person for you, in life and in their absence (or presence) in death.

Now write a poem based on your essay, not too long, but long enough. Try as much as possible to avoid generalizations, abstractions, and spelling out your feelings by naming them directly. Try as much as possible to communicate these emotions with images: metaphors (the heavy box in “Michiko Dead,” the wren in “Elegy for Jane,” Shakespeare’s “poor player”), metaphysical conceits (fanciful metaphors such as the carriage in “Because I could not stop…” or the brown paper in “The Term”), or luminous details (the busyness of “Bustle In a House,” the warmth of the doe’s belly in “Traveling in the Dark.”)

Alternate Prompt

Analyze one or more of the above examples. (If that sounds mysterious, just think of it as a book report.) What are the images that resonate with you and what feelings do they bring up?

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. Please share, reblog, link to, but do not copy or alter.