Bloom, for many decades a teacher of poetry at Yale, was 79 when he gathered this collection: "Last Poems". The "last poems", here, were sometimes double-last: the last or almost-last poems they wrote as well as poems about their own approaching deaths, about their own "last"s. These poems came from that special contemplation that poets (and other artists) are, perhaps, best capable of: revealing new facets and ways of life, even here as life is coming to an end. I have a sneaky, maybe unworthy suspicion that this collection was, first of all, a gift to himself: indulging his own understandable interest by bringing together those poems that speak of what, reasonably was engrosseing his mind and heart. As Bloom, himself, wrote in his beautiful and insightful introduction:
"If your next birthday will be your eightieth, and you have read the greatest poetry all your life, then you begin to know that in the face of dying and death, the imagination is at once nothing and everything."
I especially like that phrase, "begin to know". Even at near-80, "in the face of dying and death", there's still a "begin to know". That fits, as does much that Bloom writes in his introduction.
Regardless, this collection is a gift to us -- when we're ready. And because in this past year, I've faced the approaching and actual deaths of those dear to me, I've found it a gift. Because, too, I'm over 60, and my own death is more real -- maybe I can bring death & dying more truly into my mind and heart.
I dip into this book from time to time. I'll read something new or re-read something well-known; sometimes I'll read several poems, sometimes just one or two. What I've gained -- I wouldn't call it solace, but a kind of peace. Maybe it's a peace from having my own thoughts better and more deeply said. Maybe it's a peace from an opening, a bit of light on a subject that can become very dark. Maybe it's a peace from joining the poem's sadness, its grieving to my own.
It's a wondrous collection. I'm not a pro with poetry, but I do read & enjoy, and I've done so for a while. Some selections, here, are what I suspect a good poetry/drama reader would expect: Marlow's Faustus in the last hour of life, Shakespeare's Prospero renouncing his magical powers; Donne's beautifully obsessive fear of sin and death in his Hymn to God the Father; George Herbert's gentle yet persistent Love (God), who "bade me welcome".
Other poems and poets were dimly known or unknown -- at least to me. Yet all of them so far (I've read most but not yet all of the poems.) have given me a line, usually several lines that I want to linger over, to savor and take inside as this or that death comes closer or happens.
Just today, for example, I read the poem, "Days of 1994", by James Merrill, whom I did not know. It was written just before his death. Merrill is looking around "these days in my friend's house, Light seeks me underground." Closing with:
Before day ends:
The spectacles, the book,
Forgetful lover and forgotten love,
Cobweb hung with trophy wings,
The fading trumpet of a car,
The knowing glance from star to star,
The laughter of old friends.
And a poet I know well, Wilfred Owen, I also read today with a poem I didn't know, this after listening last week to a young soldier talk about the death of friends. As I read that poem, "Futility", I was thinking of him & his friends as well as of the deaths of young men and children I, as therapist, have heard other soldiers describe. And I was thinking of the on-coming death of one of my own friends. "Futility" was clearly written on the death of a young friend during the trench madness of WWI, and it written only a half-year before Owen's own death:
Move him into the sun --
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds, --
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved -- still warm -- too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
-- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
All the 80+ poets and poems are given Bloom's focused introductions, leading us into the poem, the poet, and (as Bloom says) its "lastness".
If you sense, within yourself, a resonance with death, dying and "lastness", I highly recommend this book. I find it a welcome companion.
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