Death is paradoxically a part of life. One cannot possibly evaluate the richness of existence if uncoupled from the mystifying potential of non-existence hovering living reality. The cyclic threat of death and its unknowable negation, incites one to reap every breathing moment the harvest of life’s yield.
Poets seem possessed by the theme of death, perhaps owing to their command or unique observation of life. There seems a necessity to seek in the nether world some consolation, or a justification for life’s inevitable ending. Seldom, however, has a poet rivaled the delicate understanding depicted by Whitman in his “Carol of Death.”
The opening line is a revelation of this delicate transition to non-existence predicated on a poetic faith:
Come lovely and soothing death.
It is a poetic faith; there is no logic for this unexpected welcome unless a form of night logic springing from one’s dreams and aspirations of a sublime hereafter in which the immortal soul rests at the sandaled feet of God. In truth there is no conciliatory logic to death. It is a brutal, terrifying fact that can only be measured artificially by the living; only the dead knows what it is. The living in its ignorance make death beautiful — in its honoring the war dead — decoratively explaining away the untold terror.
Death to the living, Whitman implies, is an attitude, an expression either good or bad of what it might be. Although Whitman in no way implies that death is a vast indifference, I distantly feel from the tone of the words that follow that it is in actuality nothing, neither good nor bad, but out of anxiety of the living it is celebrated as a step into envious immortality:
The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veiled death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Notwithstanding this conceit of encroaching death, it is in reality a “veiled” understanding of the eternal mystery, forever unknown.
Life must go on in spite of death’s fears and excruciating loss. Thoughts on death reach all. Lincoln’s assassination incepted Whitman’s apocalyptic reflections on death. Grief struck, he nevertheless remained calm and ultimately conceived of death philosophically: that is, death was not an evil affliction on particular individuals but rather a “soothing” welcome “to all, to each sooner or later,” who having experienced life’s strife, return to their “dark mother’s arms of cool-enfolding death.”
Poetry notwithstanding, it is difficult to resign oneself the frightening shadows of ultimate reality and with bold inscrutable splendor to cry out, “float this carol with joy to thee O death.”
Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: November 2, 2004.
http://stevendedalus.joeuser.com