It is a great and prevalent misconception in our society that literary poetry is a delicate and soothing art, one of whose chief virtues lies in its ability to provide solace. In truth poetry—if it is in any way good or memorable—is violent, provoking, conscience-pricking, paradoxical, or otherwise upsetting. This makes it a particularly poor vehicle for performing the sometime ministerial office of comforting the afflicted (the alternative role of "afflicting the comfortable" is definitely not—however worth doing sometimes—suitable for all occasions).
For this reason, trying to rely on the treasure house of English poems that had meant something to me on first reading soon proved disastrous. It led, for instance, to the debacle in which I read aloud to the UU ministerial student group a poem by Larkin in which he runs over a hedgehog with his lawnmower. I selected it because it led to a conclusion that I found—for Larkin at any rate—passably anodyne. "We should be kind/while there's still time," or something to that effect.
To reach this acceptable moral, however, we first had to go over the verses in which the unoffending hedgehog is accidentally caught and mangled by the blades of the mower. There was a gasp and an "oh god," at this stage of the reading. "No, no, wait!" I said, "keep listening!" But it was too late.
I learned, if nothing else, that poetry has power.
What soon became clear is that many ministers, when forced to resort to outright literature for their quotations, will not hesitate to bowdlerize. I remember the time my supervisor handed me a collection of readings on the theme of death and transience. I noticed what appeared to be some familiar lines from Swinburne's "Garden of Proserpine":
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
I was surprised for a moment that such a daring verse, with its blasphemous implication that solace and salvation may be found in the promise of oblivion, rather than in the resurrection of the flesh, had found its way into such any otherwise inoffensive collection. Then I looked more closely.
I saw that a few key words had been changed. "No life" was now "all life." "Dead men rise up never" was missing a crucial letter. "Dead men rise up ever," is what it now said.
In other words, we had for some reason felt it necessary to include Swinburne, but we edited him to ensure he was saying the exact opposite of what he actually intended to say. In which case, it seems to me, we might as well not have included him at all. If there is to be any value in Swinburne, it is surely in the spectacle of the Victorian rebel blaspheming against the pieties of his time. His relatively insipid rhymes on their own can't be enough to merit him a place in the canon.
What bothered me too is that Swinburne's conclusion, while intentionally paradoxical, also seeks in its own way to provide solace; therefore, why are we to assume that, on its own terms, and in its own words and conveying its intended message, it has no place in a collection of ministerial readings on the theme of the impermanence of human life?
Swinburne's message, after all, belongs to a storied tradition that should not be so lightly dismissed. The idea of death as a comforting sleep and restful oblivion was not invented purely as a Pre-Raphaelite subversion of traditional Christian soteriology. It has deeper cultural roots than that. In one of his essays, Walter Kaufmann traces it back through centuries of German verse, eventually arguing that it is the most ancient of attitudes toward death. (Philippe Ariès, in his book on attitudes to death and dying, argues for a somewhat similar conclusion).
Kaufmann's take-away is that the fear of death as we know it today is more a product of centuries of Christian preaching of the perils of hellfire, than it is the natural or default state of humankind, and therefore it is a terror that would be unknown to the older pagan strands of our thinking.
I find I cannot follow him quite that far. Our observation of the animal kingdom, including hedgehogs, would tend to indicate that the fear and avoidance of death were not invented by human beings, let alone by a single human religion that came into the world two millennia ago. I have no doubt that it is precisely because death frightens us that we have always sought to solace ourselves when contemplating the subject, including by comparing death to a state of soothing rest—as the verse that Kaufmann cites proceeds to do.
He is certainly correct, however, that the Christian promise of resurrection and eternal life is not the only approach to death that has ever provided a balm for grieving or fearful minds. Swinburne's alternative account of the nature of death is also one that may have the power to bring comfort. And surely if there is a place where such a poem could be read, where such a perspective could be offered, it is in a humanistic denomination. Swapping out Swinburne's words so that they parrot a straightforward resurrectionism, therefore, seems a kind of intellectual cowardice.
Are Swinburne's words true, though? Any more true than the Christian teaching of personal immortality? Ultimately, for words to provide comfort to anyone, after all, they must carry conviction. No one is soothed by empty promises they do not find convincing or honest (one of the reasons the post facto editing of paradoxical verse in the end helps no one).
Is there comfort to be sought in the idea of death as perfect oblivion, or an infinite sleep? I can't quite see that it is so. It seems to me most accurate to say that death, if it is indeed non-existence, is a wholly negative state, and therefore fundamentally valueless. How could it not be, when anything of value can only be conceived, can only be possible, in a state of existence?
If what we mean by "badness" or evil is the absence of value, then non-being is the ultimate negation of the good. To say that death brings comfort and rest, or anything else positive, is therefore to reason by a false analogy. Death cannot be compared to sleep or calm, because both are states we only experience so long as we are alive; so long as we exist. We cannot agree with Cassius, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, when he reasons that death is to be welcomed: Why, he that cuts off twenty years of life/ Cuts off so many years of fearing death.
Non-existence cannot be welcomed, though perhaps it is not proper to say it can be feared either. It is simply inconceivable, for whatever we conceive, whatever we pass through our conceptual apparatus, must by definition belong to the realm of existence. To say or think anything about non-existence one way or the other is, therefore, impossible. And as Wittgenstein said, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
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