John Updike's Deathbed Poems Willard Spiegelman (bio) "Webster was much possessed with death / And saw the skull beneath the skin," T. S. Eliot announces with off-handed relish in "Whispers of Immortality." None of us needs any reminding; everyone is similarly possessed or obsessed, especially as age begins its inevitable toll and the depredations amass. The prospect of any death—not just of hanging, as Dr. Johnson observed—concentrates the mind pointedly. What do poets do when they fear, or know, that they are about to die? They write about death, both from their present vantage point and with an eye to their future prospects. "Remember, everybody will be there, / Sooner or later at first, then all at once," observed Howard Nemerov with his mordant wit in a poem ("Speculation") written when he was in his early fifties. And he adopts a characteristically mellow tone, part Montaigne, part college professor, at the start of his four quatrains, when he takes on the age-old psychological and religious demand that one must prepare for his death: Prepare for death. But how can you prepareFor death? Suppose it isn't an exam,But more like the Tavern Scene in Henry IV,Or that other big drunk, the Symposium? Readers have, of course, their favorite texts, their favorite poems, to use as possible guides to the universal terrain. Some poets, some poems, go gentle, some do not, but we all go, and whether we can learn from the examples of others remains a matter of considerable interest. [End Page 484] In her recent Last Looks, Last Books, Helen Vendler approaches the issue of how a handful of twentieth-century American poets tried to find a style apposite to life and, more important, to death. Often lacking the consolations of traditional religion, they had to create new ways of dealing with gradual physical and mental weakness and then with their final end. For Vendler, the poet's crisis is one of poetic form as much as subject, of moving from an older style to a newer one, of finding the language and structure of a new condition. Of the poets she writes about (Stevens, Bishop, Lowell, Merrill, and Plath), Bishop, Lowell and Plath did not, however, know they were dying, although Plath's mental derangement was part of the creative impetus as well as the subjects behind the poems in Ariel, and Lowell, never entirely healthy, was himself in a state of terminal physical and emotional fatigue before his sudden death from a heart attack in 1977. Stevens always wrote only indirectly about himself, seldom employing a first-person pronoun. Only Merrill's last book, A Scattering of Salts, contains an alertness to disease, and even this is somewhat muffled. None of Merrill's poems can really be termed an obvious self-elegy, or even an auto-obituary, a term I have borrowed from the classicist James Tatum, who traces its history back to Petronius's Satyricon, in which the flamboyant, vulgar freedman Trimalchio composes and articulates his own obituary, fulsomely delivered and fawningly applauded. The deathbed poem, at least the poem written with death in view, has a generic history of its own. Some examples from the modern period follow. In the sixteenth century, Chidiock Tichborne focuses on his imminent hanging and writes an elegy in which life and death are sequential and also, paradoxically, simultaneous: "My glass is full, and now my glass is run, / And now I live, and now my life is done." Seldom has anyone captured so precisely the brevity of our span, the sudden flickering out of our light. Seldom has the connective conjunction "and" signaled both opposition and equation. The present tense grips the poet and his readers because everything is always happening and always vanishing at the same time. One moment you are alive; the [End Page 485] next you are not. Here today, and gone today. Comes the fury with the abhorred shears and "slits the thin-spun life," according to Milton in "Lycidas." Individual self-awareness leaves us always knowing that death will come, even though we don't know exactly when. Thomas Nashe, in his "Litany in Time of Plague," thinks...
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Jan 1, 2021
Simon Goldhill 
