The Age of Poetry and the Poetry of Age: Reflections from the past, for our future.

So it all started with a review of a book titled, On Poets & Poetry, by William H. Pritchard, in the Wall Street Journal (reading in route on plane back home from a trip this past week) and the review was positive and the contents looked intriguing to me as several names (poets) popped up that are some of my lifelong favorites – thus, I knew I had to check the book out in greater detail.

Here is the WSJ review:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574332601721398442.html

After finding the book at the university library this weekend, I was surprised (but then again I am always open to the possibility of synchronicity –

[I know, I know…I can hear you now: ‘you Scott? the man that thrives on reductionistic and soul-less technology and biological mechanics of life (both ontology and ontogeny)?]

…but the news of my complete affinity for the extended phenotype and bio-cognitive dimensions of life has been greatly exaggerated; I am still connected to the metaphysics of aging – and find REFLECTION to be as necessary as the scientific dose of daily bread. By reflection I mean: music, poetry, film – and of course – literature – that weaves a tapestry for understanding the human condition across the life course – but especially into the “second half.”

[Thus, please be on standby with review of the new book {fiction} by James Lee Burke “Rain Gods” with the protagonist as Sheriff Hackberry Holland – a man into his seventies! So rare to read of the main character at that age – and so far the book is outstanding – but more on that later]

So, William Pritchard’s book, On Poets & Poetry (2009) was a well worth the read, but what ignited the synchronicity was Pritchard’s section in the book titled – Hardy’s Poetry of Old Age (pp. 95-115) which covered Hardy’s work past the age of 75. The surprising comment by Pritchard:

“…it was an age that few of his poetic contemporaries and successors survived into and also kept on writing: Yeats died at seventy-four, Eliot at seventy-six but had stopped writing poems; Stevens died at seventy-five; Frost and Pound made it into their eighties, and William Carlos Williams nearly did; Robert Graves reached ninety but had been senile for years. Hardy died short of his eighty-eighth birthday…” (p. 96).

Hardy’s Poetry of Old Age

First of all, I had to stop and think of the name and works that I was familiar with when I think of Thomas Hardy (and to be honest I did not know much of his poetry): Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895) – but poetry?

So I was very attentive to Pritchard’s careful review and analysis of Hardy’s poetry of “old age” and I was delighted and educated to a greater level of appreciation for the age of poetry and the poetry of age via Hardy but I was also struck by the similarities (if I may make the connections) with his work and two other poets – one perhaps not so surprising, and the other to where I make the leap and offer to you a possible (and eerie) bridge between the content, style, and effect.

The two poems that I recommend to you (and two out of several that Pritchard highlights) are “The Missed Train” and “At Castle Boterel.”

Here are some excerpts:

“The Missed Train”

Thus one time to me….

Dim wastes of dead years bar away

Then from now. But such happenings to-day

Fall to lovers, may be!

Years, years as shoaled seas,

Truly, stretch now between! Less and less

Shrink the visions vast in me. –Yes.

Then in me: Now in these.

The effect is (at least to me) the capturing of the weight of the passage of time and an epiphany of looking into the mirror and seeing the person who has aged – not someone else – but you – or me – that person. Me. I. I am the one that this is all happening to…and it did so rather quickly – which is the surprise and the wonderment – and perhaps the regret – and acceptance.

“At Castle Boterel”

It filled but a minute. But was there ever

A time of such quality, since or before,

In that hill’s story? To one mind never,

Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,

By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,

And much have they faced there, first and last,

Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;

But what they record in colour and cast

Is – that we too passed.

Well, the mood is reflective and the memory is clear as though it happened just yesterday. But is not that the point? It does not matter – the experience is there – retrievable and temporally in flux – it was then, but it is here – now. Our lives as moments and as years – gone by, but then reawakened into flashes of memory and a welling up of emotions – and the visual theatre – the full screen is before us – that is our lives up there that we see. Who else shall know that this has happened? Your lover – your friend – your spouse – your children? Who else? And perhaps that is the extent of it – even though thousands have done it before – and have already moved on. The dead – and now the living – and shall be dead too – with more living to follow…and so on, but who shall capture it? So that it does not all simply become dust – and leaves that fall onto the ground.

Or perhaps that is it.

As I contemplate the neurons and the genes and the biotechnologies that will forever alter our aging in this century, I will never forget – and I will never let go of how poetry can also alter my life – and hopefully yours – if we shall only take the time to read and reflect.

So what other two poets did I find similarities with Thomas Hardy (and the review and analysis of Pritchard) and his poetry of old age?

1)    T.S. Eliot – and Four Quartets –, which should be, required reading for every gerontologist – and required reading for every person with their own discovery of aging.

2)    Rainier Maria Rilke – and many of his works; for example – I choose this one, but it only illustrates and does not exhaust the possibilities –

Again and again, though we know the landscape of love

And the little graveyard with its lamenting names

And the terrible reticent gorge in which the others

End: again and again we go out in couples

Under the ancient trees, lie down again and again

Among the wild flowers, facing the sky.

Aging is both microscopic and macroscopic. For every telomere and mitochondria analyzed, I will need to have the works of Shakespeare and J.S. Bach synthesized. As I learn more of my genomic landscape, I will need to have the painting of Böcklin, “Isle of the Dead” as the landscape too.

If I read an article in JAMA or JAGS or JoG:B, then I will listen to J.S. Bach: Prelude, From Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1 In G Major by Yo-Yo Ma            to counterweight – for the aging body – and brain – and soul.

For every scientific discovery – I will also need the poetic reflection.

Thanks, Scott Wright