100 Poems to Break Your Heart

by Edward Hirsch

Larkin’s poem begins in the first-person singular but drops the “I” in the second stanza and never picks it up again. The poem thereafter universalizes, speaking in the first-person plural for all of us. It may have been a necessary psychological strategy. For example, it might be more natural to say, “My mind blanks at the glare,” though the second stanza begins, “The mind blanks at the glare.” It may be that the glower of his own death was so great that he needed to displace it. He italicizes the sentence “No rational being / Can fear a thing it will not feel ” so that it will sound like a quotation, but it’s not a sentiment he can possibly embrace because it is precisely what “we fear—no sight, no sound, / No touch or taste or smell . . .” Larkin’s speaker can’t look at his own death directly—“The anaesthetic from which none comes round. // And so it stays just on the edge of vision.” Throughout the poem this vision keeps blurring and coming back into focus. The poet cannot fend off the central premise of his poem, even as he keeps finding clever aphoristic ways of phrasing the dilemma, as when he hyphenates “furnace-fear,” alliterates “Being brave,” and presses the d’s, n’s, and w’s in the line “Death is no different whined at than withstood.”

  The last stanza marks the final transition point of the aubade: “Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.” The room comes into focus, “plain as a wardrobe,” and brings with it the fateful helpless knowledge of what we all know but can’t escape or accept: death is one day closer now. Meanwhile, morning comes on and “telephones crouch, getting ready to ring / In locked-up offices.” Archie Burnett, Larkin’s remarkably assiduous editor, has tracked down virtually all his sources, such as his deliberate borrowing here from Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings, one of his favorite novels, for the unusual image of “the telephone crouching on the floor alone, ringing unheeded.” There is a stoic recognition that time never stops. The sky may be sunless, but “Work has to be done” and mail must be delivered: “Postmen like doctors go from house to house.”

  Larkin’s gloomy prognosis has sparked extreme reactions from other poets. The universalizing change from the first-person singular into the first-person plural, the quiet transformation of “I” into “we,” may be one of the reasons. The poem’s powerful force field is so negative that it demands that the reader reckon with it. Seamus Heaney considered it “the definitive post-Christian English poem, one that abolishes the soul’s traditional pretension to immortality and denies the Deity’s immemorial attribute of infinite personal concern.” Czesław Miłosz, a formidable critic, was troubled by the nihilism of “Aubade.” He called it “a high poetic achievement” but also protested:

  And yet the poem leaves me not only dissatisfied but indignant, and I wonder why myself. Perhaps we forget too easily the centuries-old mutual hostility between reason, science and science-inspired philosophy on the one hand and poetry on the other? Perhaps the author of the poem went over to the side of the adversary and his ratiocination strikes me as a betrayal? For, after all, death in the poem is endowed with the supreme authority of Law and universal necessity, while man is reduced to nothing, to a bundle of perceptions, or even less, to an interchangeable statistical unit. But poetry by its very essence has always been on the side of life.

  Miłosz couldn’t bear the thought of life without redemption.

  C. K. Williams responded to Miłosz’s argument with the counterclaim that there is a “redemptive gravity” in Larkin’s work. Heaney too argued that a poem with such generative energy does not side with the adversary. Yet he concurred that, “for all its heartbreaking truths and beauties, ‘Aubade’ reneges on what Yeats called the ‘spiritual intellect’s great work.’”

  It’s possible to find oneself vacillating about “Aubade.” Death has vindictive force in the poem, and yet the last line seems oddly encouraging. Larkin made a revealing comment about it in 1984: “Some doctor read that last line ‘Postmen like doctors go from house to house’ and said, ‘It’s years you know since doctors did house to house visiting.’ But I said ‘No. It isn’t postmen, comma, like doctors, comma, but just postmen like doctors.’ I meant the arrival of the postman in the morning is consoling, healing.”

  It turns out that as long as we’re alive, another morning arrives even after the darkest night of the soul. The dailiness of life starts all over again. Larkin’s negativity weights the evidence, but the generating form of the poem reaches out to an unseen listener, a human other, and suggests that the poem, perhaps despite itself, stands on the side of life.

  William Meredith

  * * *

  “Parents”

  (1978)

  Many of William Meredith’s most significant poems revolve around one mysterious insight into common human experience. He probed the dark complexities of human conduct with a quiet humor and determination. He was writing a modest form of wisdom poetry. Here’s the poem “Parents” from his finest book, his last single collection, The Cheer (1980). Meredith added the dedication when he reprinted the poem in Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems (1987).

  Parents

  (for Vanessa Meredith and Samuel Wolf Gezari)

  What it must be like to be an angel

  or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.

  * * *

  The last time we go to bed good,

  they are there, lying about darkness.

  * * *

  They dandle us once too often,

  these friends who become our enemies.

  * * *

  Suddenly one day, their juniors

  are as old as we yearn to be.

  * * *

  They get wrinkles where it is better

  smooth, odd coughs, and smells.

  * * *

  It is grotesque how they go on

  loving us, we go on loving them.

  * * *

  The effrontery, barely imaginable,

  of having caused us. And of how.

  * * *

  Their lives: surely

  we can do better than that.

  * * *

  This goes on for a long time. Everything

  they do is wrong, and the worst thing,

  * * *

  they all do it, is to die,

  taking with them the last explanation,

  * * *

  how we came out of the wet sea

  or wherever they got us from,

  * * *

  taking the last link

  of that chain with them.

  * * *

  Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling,

  to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren.

  “Parents” explores the complex doubleness of our relationship to those strange familiars, “these friends who become our enemies.” The couplet form seems especially appropriate for a poem about the duality and duplicity of parents. The couplet, two successive lines of poetry, is the most elementary of units, just like the parental unit. Here each of the unrhymed couplets has the heft and authority of an epigram. The poem follows an arc from our first uncomprehending sense of the existence of our parents to our final bleak recognition after their deaths. It’s not a confessional poem—we don’t learn anything specific about Meredith’s own parents—but a poem generalized from personal experience. In this way it’s like J. V. Cunningham’s remembrance in “Montana Fifty Years Ago.”

  In his Paris Review interview, Meredith said that the idea for “Parents” came to him after he’d gone to a Thanksgiving dinner where the host couple had three surviving parents, who were in attendance. These three seemed to him charming, interesting people, about his own age, while to their children they seemed, as parents normally do, embarrassing, tacky, stupid, and tedious, albeit lovable. He saw his friends’ suffering and he remembered such suffering himself. That was the trigger.

  There are just thirteen two-line stanzas in “Parents,” yet it packs in a lifetime of observations. The first eight couplets are closed, which means that the sense and syntax come to conclusion at the end
of the second line, and each one has a feeling of self-containment and enclosure. To start: our parents never seem entirely human to us and we have no idea what they might really be like: “What it must be like to be an angel / or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.” In the beginning, each of the parents’ actions seems like a kind of betrayal to the child. The first line postulates something, say, “The last time we go to bed good,” which the second line radically modifies: “they are there, lying about darkness.” All the pressure hinges on the word “lying”: as we grow older, we find our parents’ attempts to reassure us simply misleading.

  In almost every couplet, the second line contains a kind of punch line. Think of the pause between the first observation, “It is grotesque how they go on / loving us,” and the second one, “we go on loving them.” The word “grotesque” is unexpected in this context and carries a comic hideousness. The first line is rueful and exasperated: “It is grotesque how they go on.” The line break hovers and hesitates. The drop down to “loving us” has the deadpan timing of a good joke. Worse yet is the wry knowledge: “we go on loving them.” So too a precise sense of timing governs the colon and the line break in “Their lives: surely / we can do better than that.” It’s almost as if the word “surely” had been underlined. The word contains an attitude, all those years of rolling our eyes and condescending to our parents.

  There is a turn in the ninth stanza of this poem. Two-thirds of the way through the poem we come to the first open-ended two-line stanza. A couplet is considered open when the sense carries forward past the second line into the next line or lines. “Everything / they do is wrong, and the worst thing, // they all do it, is to die . . .” “Everything they do is wrong” seems like something that a teenager might say. But then the tone shifts. The phrase “they all do it” is an interruption, an explanation. It creates a sense of time slipping by, of parents passing on, of children left behind with no final explanations.

  There is a keen psychological understanding in the last couplet, in the recognition that each of us continues to carry on a one-sided lifelong conversation with our parents long after they have died. This conversation is literally incomprehensible to the next generations. Even as we ourselves age, we go on crying out to the people who created and formed us. We are forever linked to them. No matter how much we continue to call on and question them, though, we never get back an answer.

  Hayden Carruth

  * * *

  “Essay”

  (1978)

  Hayden Carruth’s poem “Essay” first appeared in his book Brothers, I Loved You All (1978). He titled it this way because of the essayistic or discursive movement of the text, which follows his thought process and makes an argument. It sounds like a piece of prose and moves like a poem. It may not be entirely coincidental that in the mid-seventies the poet Robert Pinsky made the case for just this kind of poem in his book The Situation of Poetry. The discursive poem, he argued, is an explanatory poem that moves across a wide swatch of territory: “It is speech, organized by its meaning, avoiding the distances and complications of irony on one side and the ecstatic fusion of the speaker, meaning, and subject on the other. The idea is to have all the virtues of prose, in addition to those qualities and degrees of precision which can be called poetic.” Carruth was already employing the essayistic mode that Pinsky was calling for. He too was making a statement and accessing a terrain. He would also use the method in other poems, such as “Essay on Love” and “Essay on Death.”

  Essay

  So many poems about the deaths of animals.

  Wilbur’s toad, Kinnell’s porcupine, Eberhart’s squirrel,

  and that poem by someone—Hecht? Merrill?—

  about cremating a woodchuck. But mostly

  I remember the outrageous number of them,

  as if every poet, I too, had written at least

  one animal elegy; with the result that today

  when I came to a good enough poem by Edwin Brock

  about finding a dead fox at the edge of the sea

  I could not respond; as if permanent shock

  had deadened me. And then after a moment

  I began to give way to sorrow (watching myself

  sorrowlessly the while), not merely because

  part of my being had been violated and annulled,

  but because all these many poems over the years

  have been necessary—suitable and correct. This

  has been the time of the finishing off of the animals.

  They are going away—their fur and their wild eyes,

  their voices. Deer leap and leap in front

  of the screaming snowmobiles until they leap

  out of existence. Hawks circle once or twice

  above their shattered nests and then they climb

  to the stars. I have lived with them fifty years,

  we have lived with them fifty million years,

  and now they are going, almost gone. I don’t know

  if the animals are capable of reproach.

  But clearly they do not bother to say good-bye.

  You can hear the ghost of blank verse in Carruth’s even-keeled free-verse lines. The poem operates in the middle range—above speech and below song. It begins informally—“So many poems about the deaths of animals”—as if we’ve been dropped into the midst of a conversation that the speaker is carrying on partly with himself, partly with his poetry peers. He goes on to prove his point by referring to Richard Wilbur’s “The Death of a Toad,” Galway Kinnell’s “The Porcupine,” and Richard Eberhardt’s “On a Squirrel, Crossing the Road, in New England.” This is a poem of thinking in action. The speaker doesn’t bother to cover up the fact that he can’t remember who wrote a poem about cremating a woodchuck. I myself don’t recall any poems like this by Anthony Hecht or James Merrill, but there is a good poem by Maxine Kumin about trying to kill woodchucks. But perhaps that’s not the point. None of these pieces particularly matter—he could have listed many more. It’s the sheer number of poems about dead animals that seems to have deadened the genre. The speaker doesn’t exempt himself from this critique, either. He feels that the experience of writing about dead animals has been used up. And it is coming across a decent-enough lyric by a decent-enough poet, the British writer Edwin Brock, that sends him over the top.

  The poem structurally turns in the middle of the eleventh line, as the speaker observes his own feeling, as if from a distance: “And then after a moment / I began to give way to sorrow (watching myself / sorrowlessly the while) . . .” The warm or sorrowful feeling of the poet and the cool or unashamed reasonableness of the essayist are battling it out. The poem employs the language of argumentation (“not merely because / part of my being had been . . . annulled, / but because all these many poems over the years / have been necessary—suitable and correct”) to make a conclusive point: “This has been the time of the finishing off of the animals.”

  The language noticeably changes after the speaker makes this short, sad, direct statement: “They are going away.” The drier essayistic mode yields to a kind of lyricism when he talks about the bodies and voices of wild animals. He repeats the word “leap” three times to enact the way that the deer leaping away from “screaming snowmobiles” somehow end up leaping out of existence itself. Likewise the hawks regretfully circle their “shattered nests” just once or twice before climbing “to the stars.” People have always felt connected to animals. We’ve observed the ways we are both like and unlike them. Notice how the speaker links his own time span to our long human history. “I have lived with them fifty years,” he recalls. “We have lived with them fifty million years.” The heart lurches over the line break and the conjunction in the next line: “and now they are going, almost gone.” We feel the desperate progression from “going” to “almost gone.”

  The animals may not reproach us, but the end of this poem is a reproach. “Essay” sharpens into an unexpected elegy for the animals, who leave without sa
ying goodbye. There is no ritual farewell. Carruth’s new kind of animal poem, which he had resisted writing, has now become a pointedly political poem. He had overcome his own objection to animal poems and reversed his original argument, thereby refreshing the genre. In doing so, he created an acute essay-poem about the extinction of different species, an accusation against human beings, and a humane lyric about the death of animals.

  James Schuyler

  * * *

  “Arches”

  (1978)

  James Schuyler is often celebrated as a poet who celebrated the everyday and ordinary, what he called “the pure pleasure of / Simply looking.” He took a walk or peered through his window, and the poem became the daily record of what he saw. He had a keen eye and reveled in particularity. But Schuyler was afflicted by periodic bouts of mental illness, and he was often looking at life from the outside, as through a looking glass. The reason that daily life takes on such a luminous glow in a great deal of his work is because he was effectively cut off from it much of the time. He cherished the familiar because it was never quite familiar enough, never something that he could take for granted. He reminds me of the eighteenth-century English poet Christopher Smart, in the way his work spotlights and exaggerates familiar things. Both fastened themselves to daily life as a meaningful way to hold on to the world.