As I was flipping around in Saskia Hamilton’s second book Divide These, I was reminded how much I liked this poem:
“One Wiser Says to the Other Unwiser”
Jot this down:
if you favor your left shoulder, you are anxious.
If the right shoulder were to collapse,
the dead may have entered the muscle. They choose to persist,
or you choose to allow them to.
This idea of willfully holding death close to you reminded me strongly of some of the opening advice from the Code of the Samurai, the 400 year-old Japanese guidebook, written by the wiser for the unwiser, to instruct on how to behave like a proper warrior:
The idea is to take care of your public and private duties day and night, and then whenever you have any free time when your mind is unoccupied, you think of death, bringing it to mind attentively. It is said that in the great hero Kusunoki Masahige’s instructions to his son Masayuki, he told him to “always get used to death.”
This is for the understanding of neophyte knights.
This made me try to think of poems in which this rule had been broken and death had been forgotten or ignored.
Because I could not stop for Death–
He kindly stopped for me–
The Carriage held but just Ourselves–
And Immortality.
We slowly drove–He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility–
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess–in the Ring–
We passed the fields of Gazing Grain–
We passed the Setting Sun–
Or rather–He passed Us–
The Dews drew quivering and chill–
For only Gossamer, my Gown–
My Tippet–only Tulle–
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground–
The Roof was scarcely visible–
The Cornice–in the Ground–
Since then–’tis Centuries–and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity–
Which led me to try to think of a poem in which death is actually divorced from its power:
DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
Which led to me to searching for a poem in which the terms of life and death were unclear and both seemed to stand on equal footing. Back to Saskia Hamilton:
“Year One”
If the eyes move to the right: no.
If they stay in the center: yes.
The left is for listening because they sit
on the left side of the bed.
Only the eyes move. Someone
swabs her lips.
__
The first nurse is too cheerful.
The second does not know
how to speak to the speechless.
The third strokes her arm:
something settles down:
one lying, one sitting,
one in the doorway.
Hamilton, Saskia. Divide These. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2005.
Daidoji, Yuzan. The Code of the Samurai. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 1999.
Dickinson, Emily. Final Harvest. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961.
Donne, John. Complete Poetry. New York: Modern Library, 2001.