The opening line comes to us from Shakespeare’s sonnet 71:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
William Shakespeare, sonnet 71
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell;
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.
The idea that “the wise world should look into your moan, and mock you with me after I am gone” seems extraordinary. Not only might mourning bring woe to the beloved, but that the world might knowingly participate in, or even compound, the beloved’s agitation or depression. In a sense, the sonnet seems to anticipate Wordsworth’s opening:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much With Us”
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Yet, Wordsworth’s almost astonishingly contemporary sense of the world pictures a world falling away from us, a world that we are losing or have lost due to our own activities or our own desires. Shakespeare’s world seems to retain an almost singular consciousness, an awareness, willing or not, of our human existence. It is a world that might “look” or even “mock” the individual who resides within it. In contrast, Wordsworth’s world lies almost dormant alongside our existence, “up-gathered now like sleeping flowers”, and in his sonnet, we appear to have lost our participation in it through “getting and spending” and “lay[ing] waste our powers”.
Both Wordsworth’s and Shakespeare’s worlds might be our own, depending on how we choose to frame our perspective, but Wordsworth’s idea offers a romantic glance over our shoulder and into our past. Our having departed from the “pagan” “creed outworn” has deprived us of a structure that might have offered more comfort to our existence, with a framework of ancient gods to reassure us. Wordsworth’s sonnet also seems preternaturally prescient, especially in light of our own climate crisis:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51123638
Sir David Attenborough warns of our climate ‘crisis moment’ as he has continued to do, serving as a senior statesman to the global environment for as long as many of us can recall. But even the business side, those in the seats most promoting ‘getting and spending’ have begun to sit up and take notice, even if that is only because the climate crisis will begin to cut into their profits:
Of course, in the end, if the challenges are not, or cannot be, successfully addressed, these massive business concerns will be unlikely to have any profits at all. No businesses. No customers. One can hem and haw and fudge on climate change all one wishes (although that places one in a decidedly precarious position in terms of one’s morals), but in the end, whether the so-called climate ‘deniers’ believe in climate change or not, its impact on the lives of their loved ones, or on the very existence of their children and/or grandchildren will be equally profound.
In some ways, our whole time, our era, has become like the opening lines of a death poem. It is a poem that we write collectively, and yet this composition may have more in common with Japanese death poems than it has with either Shakespeare or Wordsworth. For Shakespeare’s narrator, there will be continuation. The beloved, it is assumed, will go on after the narrator’s death. For Wordsworth, the continuation is marred by a disillusioned and broken present, and yet, as bleak as it may be, existence goes on. Both speak to an audience, a reader or listener to whom they offer their thoughts–an auditor with awareness and understanding.
Our collective poem for this life now seems more like those end of life poems, largely in the Zen tradition, where the self, as in death, remains only marginally present in the text. These often seem as reflexive as certain verbs, not necessarily referring to another, but instead remembering the self to the self without any necessary extension beyond that containment. With some of the most famous examples having been written in the form of haiku (known in the West for its three line, 5-7-5 syllabic structure), continuation or sustenance frequently emerges in terms of the traditional reflection of human experience that is also often rolled into the haiku, the structure that Kenneth Yasuda refers to as “where, what, and when”.* Yasuda offers an example by perhaps the greatest master of the haiku form, Matsuo Basho:
On a withered bough,
A crow alone is perching,
Autumn evening now.**
The observer remains secondary to the observed. The natural world is foregrounded even as the observer becomes merely an obscure point from which the observations of branch, crow, and season emerge.
While this suggests the potential for a coming demise, it is not a death poem per se. Yet, even Bashō’s own death poem speaks more to the journey and the natural world around it than it does to the traveler:
Sick on my journey,
only my dreams will wander
these desolate moors.
Bashō dissolves into only his dreams wandering on desolate moors–the moors symbolizing our earthly existence, and the wandering dreams are all that any of us really leave behind us when we go. Again, it is the natural world that remains, that endures.
One wonders what the poet might have thought today, when moors and forests in places like Australia and California, plagued by an unceasing succession of devastating fires, become increasingly desolate. The death poem that we have written, and that we continue to write upon the land that supports us, represents an inevitable backlash against our hubris. Our own displacement, our own conflagration seems to be something to which the gods have left us, letting us depend on our own devices to solve our predicament. Let us hope that we can do so.
Perhaps, like Togyu (who died in 1749 at the age of forty-four), poets who come after us, if any do, will recognise the impermanence, the eternal change expressed in this critical moment in our history:
When autumn winds blow
not one leave remains
the way it was.
Or perhaps like Toko (who died in 1795 at the age of eighty-six), they might recognise the futility of all record, or all human observation or thought:
Death poems
are mere delusion–
death is death.***
Should humanity endure, should we somehow find a way to help heal and restore a more natural balance to our world, we can only hope that we will also learn to better govern ourselves, with deeper concern for all instead of for only a few. Such governments as there may be must care for their people, and not leave the poor and helpless to fend for themselves against the incessantly pursuing wolves of ignorance, poverty, hunger, and ill health.
While this idea of taking the reigns of our own carriage, of taking better control of our lives and our world is not new, it is often most profoundly and dramatically expressed in various ways in popular culture. In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, there comes a moment when Harry and his unconscious godfather have collapsed, exhausted, at the edge of a small lake in a dark wood. There, they are attacked by the dementors, demonic creatures who kill their victims by sucking out their souls. At their darkest moment, a wizard appears on the far shore of the water, and conjures a ‘patronus charm’, a magical spirit protector that radiates joy and drives the dementors away. Certain that he has seen his father’s ghost who somehow arrived to save the stranded pair with his patronus charm, Harry travels back through time with his friend Hermione, and gains a new perspective on his rescue:
At the moment of crisis, Harry finally realizes that no one will arrive, and that he must save himself. Harry, orphaned as a baby, steps up to take his own father’s place, fathering himself, and taking that mantle on his shoulders, assumes the guidance of his world.
Our present crisis is no less dire, and our need to address our own challenges no less essential. We stand on the threshold of our own continued existence, and the ship of state, instead of turning, appears to be standing still. It is with our permission that it does so. We allow our leaders to continue to focus on issues of immigration and profit at the expense of our very selves.
While I do not necessarily advocate open rebellion or active revolution, we must undergo a revolution in our thoughts and actions, our attitudes and our behaviours. And this must happen now. Today. Not next week after that next job application has been submitted. Not after this chapter has been edited, not after tea. The time for slotting the necessity of planetary care somewhere down the to do list is long since gone. We stare into an abyss, and it is glaring back at us through the black and bloody lens of charred trees, flooding, and displacement.
Only through a thorough rejection and an active refutation of the purely selfish, profit driven incentives might we be able to save ourselves. Only by building a new structure of value will be able to leave anything behind us. Otherwise, our death poem will be a decimated world, where no one will be living to read our work, or to know any of the poetic side of our being and our lives.
A bit shrill? A bit histerical? Certainly the coming conflagration won’t consume us all. Surely, Ghost, you’re being silly. Passenger pigeons are the most abundant birds in the world, they could never go extinct!**** Certainly we will rebuild as we have always done, profit again as we have always done.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. We shall see. Science tells us that it may be too late even now, that we may have miscalculated, that the shadow of the hand of doom now sweeps inexorably over us. No longer mourn for me when I am dead for that is now unless perhaps I seize the slender thread of care that might continue my existence.
What can we do? My urging now is for every reader of this blog to walk into the coming weeks and years while keeping thoughts of change, conservation, and stewardship in the forefront of our minds. Change the way we think, the way we do, the way we vote, the way we spend. “No longer mourn for me when I am dead”, but let us change the now that we, collectively, may live.
Do not be dissuaded or deterred by the ‘climate deniers’. Do not look to so-called governmental ‘leaders’, who have been, almost uniformly less than useless in addressing our planetary challenges. The whirlwind is upon us, and it will find them soon enough. Look to your families, your friends, and your fellows, your local trees, and your own habits. Make the changes that you can make now, and join the larger actions pushing for larger changes.
Vote with dollars, pounds, your local currency. Let us not get and spend and lay waste to to our powers. Spend less with egregiously polluting firms. Support alternative packaging. Strive for less negative impact in all the ways you can. Shop locally. Travel less. Encourage others to do the same, but be inclusive of immigrants and refugees. Strive to open borders rather than to close them. Be inclusive rather than exclusive.
Further ideas are ubiquitous, and some may be found here: https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_offices/armenia/help_us/eco_help_living/
And here are the three major ways that we tend to impact the environment, often without even thinking about it (and, no, you need not join the Omega movement to read and implement them): https://www.eomega.org/article/3-biggest-ways-to-reduce-your-environmental-impact
If we all focus, we may yet have a chance. Let us write our death poem with grace and not with ashes. Let the wise world mock as it wishes, so long as it remains.
As for leaving something behind us, here’s David Gilmour with Sonnet 18:
While I realise that this remains a specialist blog, read largely (albeit hardly exclusively) by academics, I still urge my readers to let the acceleration of this effort to save ourselves begin here, now, and with us. Let this effort live, and let this give life to thee. To us.
*Yasuda, Kenneth. The Japanese Haiku. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 2000, p.41,
**One of Japan’s most famous poets, Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉, 1644–1694), lived during the Edo period, under the Tokugawa Shogunate. Known for his elegant haiku (hokku) poems, he himself believed that his true skill lay in renku, a poetic form involving others and constructing a poem in turns. His most famous work is probably おくのほそ道, meaning “Narrow road to/of the interior”, contains many of his finest verses and thoughts. The work symbolizes, among other things, a ‘casting off’, a kind of shedding away of earthly things–leaving behind old connections, and even one’s self, in preparation for the end of one’s earthly time. Any writer, thinker, or poet could do much worse than to spend some time with Bashō, and perhaps accompanying him on his travels. An excellent English translation of Bashō’s most well known work is: Matsuo Bashō. Back Roads to Far Towns: Bashōs Travel Journal. Translated by Cid Corman and Susumu Kamaike. Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2004.
***Both Togyu and Toko’s poems, and many more Japanese death poems, may be found in: Japanese Death Poems. Rutland, VT: C.E. Tuttle, 1986.
****Once so abundant that observers described flocks of them taking over an hour to pass, that they would darken the sky to the point of temporarily blotting out the sun, and that their collective wings would sound like thunder, the passenger pigeon was hunted to extinction over 100 years ago in large part because people believed that such an ubiquitous bird could never be eradicated. An excellent article on the passenger pigeon may be found here: https://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2014/why-passenger-pigeon-went-extinct
I was absorbed the whole way. Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you, Daniel!
passenger pigeon
gutter a beautiful frieze
the bard & the bird
Sere grass under rain
Dripping branches dark lightning
Against empty skies.