The Thing is Daily Done

 A friend accuses me of always responding to his cries of existential despair by quoting from some poem. He finds this distasteful, he says, because he thinks it shows that I merely want to pontificate, instead of actually trying to help him. Or, at best, I may be trying to help, but am doing so in a high-handed manner—as if I were gazing down on him from the clouds and bestowing some poetic wisdom upon a mere mortal. Instead of meeting him on his level—that is—and sharing in his pain as a gesture of solidarity, I "intellectualize" the matter. "It's like you're examining my pain as a specimen in a lab." 

I thought there was some fairness in this reproach. But I wasn't sure what to do instead.

Last night, he sent me another email on the subject of existential angst. "I'm lonely," he said. "Nobody loves me. I have no friends. I barely slept last night. Then I had a long nap. So now I'm all discombobulated." Then, he added: "Feel free to send a relevant poem." I sighed with relief. Phew—I had his permission this time! So I thought for a moment as to what poem might comfort someone in an hour of loneliness and sleep deprivation. Then it came to me: of course! John Clare's "I Am!" That great poem of loneliness: "My friends forsake me like a memory lost," etc. 

The more I gazed at the poem after sending it, the more I marveled at how perfectly apt it really was. There is of course the repeated motif of loneliness—"I am the self-consumer of my woes"—"the dearest—that I loved the best / Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest." But what better poem too for when one is feeling "discombobulated" by lack of sleep? Does not Clare perfectly describe the mood of one whose mind is thrown into a kind of aimless turmoil? "Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, / Into the living sea of waking dreams[.]"

My friend may retort: "you just sent me this poem because you want to intellectualize and speculate!" But this is untrue. The real reason I send the poems is that they console me, when I am in my own moments of existential despair—and I hope that they might provide some consolation to others. 

"But where's the consolation?" my friend often replies. "There's no solution at the end of it. The poem is just a restatement of the problem. Clare says: I'm lonely; I'm miserable. So does Housman. So does Hopkins. So does Arnold. Just so many ways of saying: 'I'm miserable.' Where's the light at the end of the tunnel? Where's the solution?" 

To which I reply: "I have a poem for that." 

The next citation bubbles up in my throat and I can't help but vomit it out. For the poets also have pointed out—and I think they're right: there is consolation to be found merely in the statement of the problem. Even if the poem does no more than that, it is already a kind of medicine. Merely by writing the source of the human affliction down in verse, we are already a good way toward consolation. 

After all, as James Thomson writes: "it gives some sense of power and passion / In helpless innocence to try to fashion / Our woe in living words." Or, as Housman put it: "If the smack [of my verse] is sour/ The better for the embittered hour." Or, as Leopardi put it: "the truth, once known, / though it is sad, has pleasures of its own." (Galassi trans.)

Is this helping? Are you consoled yet? 

Maybe not. But all I'm really trying to show with these quotations is that we can take heart, because there is no form of woe we can confront that other human beings have not already known before. There is no variety of unhappiness that the poets have not documented. 

And so—if nothing else—we can know we are not alone. To quote Cicero (citing prose now, rather than verse): "the endurance of every misfortune is rendered more easy by the fact of others having undergone the same," for, "anyone may be induced to bear what he observes many others have previously borne[.]" (Yonge trans.) As a minister once told me: his personal way of conquering the fear of death was to spend an afternoon strolling in a graveyard. Because, he thinks to himself: "If all these people have done it before, I can do it too."

In other words, no matter how hard it may seem to us as individuals to bear up under the weight of our existential plight—we learn from the poets that countless generations before us have suffered the same pain, and lived to tell about it. They bear the unbearable and survive. In other words: "the thing is daily done by many and many a one," as John Davidson once put it—since I couldn't resist a final quote.