A Companion to American Poetry. Группа авторов

A Companion to American Poetry - Группа авторов


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of the Harlem Renaissance engaged with death in some ways similar to those of other modernists, but their poems were also often shaped in part by the violence historically experienced by African Americans, and often linked with activism. Langston Hughes’ “Mazie Dies Alone in the City Hospital” (1928) is uniquely critical of the changes in how people died in the modern era: the speaker knows that it is wrong “[…] to die this way with the quiet/Over everything like a shroud” (lines 1–2) and observes that she would “rather die in the way [she] lived” (line 5). Hughes’ criticism of death trends shows some similarity to the ideas of the New Death, as well as a generally forward-looking awareness of what was wrong with how death was treated.

      Meanwhile, Hughes’ “Dear Lovely Death” (1930) also suggests a more familiar approach to death than many modern poems. Hughes addresses Death as a friend: “Dear lovely Death/That taketh all things under wing—” (lines 1–2) and sees Death as a “change” (line 4) and a respite for “This suffering flesh” (line 6). Karla Holloway has written of how “the anticipation of death and dying figured into the experiences of black folk so persistently, given how much more omnipresent death was for them than for other Americans” (2002, p. 6). Additionally, the church remained prominent in African American life, and worked in conjunction with black funeral homes to provide a culturally distinct mode of mourning (Holloway 2002, pp.150–188), so the estrangement from both traditional religious beliefs and the funeral establishment may not have been experienced in exactly the same way in the African American community. Yet, religion remained a complex subject: in “Song for a Dark Girl” (1927), Hughes evokes a poetic tradition that viewed Christianity in part as a religion imposed upon the oppressed during slavery. The speaker views the lynched body of his lover and finds little comfort in a god who has allowed this cruel injustice:

      Way Down South in Dixie

      (Bruised body high in air)

      I asked the white Lord Jesus

      What was the use of prayer.

      (lines 5–8)

      During World War II (1939–1945) American poetry continued to present a bleak view of death. Poems from the World War II years continued many of the concerns of earlier twentieth-century poems. Modernist Mina Loy’s “On Third Avenue” (1942) suggests a comparison between human lives and the passing of figures on a trolley:

      Transient in the dust,

      the brilliancy

      of a trolley

      loaded with luminous busts;

      lovely in anonymity

      they vanish

      with the mirage

      of their passage.

      (p. 110)

      The familiar image of dust invites a comparison of the anonymity of the city with the anonymity found in death, while the passage of figures on a trolley suggests the brevity of life. In Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945), the speaker’s sacrifice of his life in war is gruesome and meaningless. He is sacrificed not only to the war effort but to the “State” (line 1), which depersonalizes his death inside the plane into a mechanical process. His body is not handled with respect: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose” (line 5). Death in this poem is not heroic, but horrific.

      Preceded by a centuries-long shift away from Puritan ideas about the afterlife and toward an emphasis on the body and this life, modernists wrestled with mortality and ultimately accepted death as inevitable and final except for the prospect of becoming part of the larger universe—a part of nature, or dust to dust. For many, this made mourning more intense because the deceased person was truly gone forever and there would be no reunion with loved ones in Heaven, but at the same time the fact that there is only this life made earthly existence all the more precious.

      NOTES

      1 1. David Stannard estimates that only seventy-four percent of children survived as long as their tenth birthday in Andover in Puritan times, and the mortality rate was even higher in other communities such as Boston (1975, pp. 16–18).

      2 2. “May 11, 1661,” “By Night When Others Soundly Slept,” and “On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet” were among poems published posthumously in 1867.

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