by Ed Simon
Impossible to know which one of those perennial evergreen subjects – love or death – poetry considers more, but certainly verse can be particularly charged when it combines those two. Love and death, the only topics worthy of serious contemplation, where anything else worth orienting the mind towards is merely an amalgamation of that pair. Maybe that seems counterintuitive, or worse still as mere sophistry, to claim that love and death are ineffable in the manner of God, for after all there are clear definitions of love and death, and furthermore everyone has an experience of them. But it’s their universality that makes them ineffable, because both are defined by paradox. Death, after all, is the one commonality to all of life, the only thing that absolutely every person will experience, but also that which nobody currently alive can say anything definitive about. A paradox, death. Love, though sadly not as universal as death, would seem to be less paradoxical, and yet genuine love is marked by a desire for personal extinction (not unlike death), a submerging of the self into the being of another. An arithmetic not of addition, but of multiplication. Of one and one equaling one.
In American modernist Edna St. Vincent Millay’s effecting “Dirge Without Music,” a free verse four-quatrain poem written in an alternate rhyme scheme that evokes a ballad first published in 1928, death is read in light of love in a manner that provides a glimpse of comprehension as regards those things which are ineffable. Her poem explores the tensions in love and death, not least of all in the title of the poem which is a paradox. A dirge, by definition, is composed of music, so that to have a dirge without music is nonsensical, like a sculpture without shape or a story without narrative. Yet that’s also precisely what death is, an experience of life – perhaps the sine qua non of life which gives it meaning – but also something that can’t be experienced in life since it marks the termination of existence. That particular aspect of death has long been remarked upon, a favored argument of the Stoics and Epicureans in ancient Greece meant as a comfort regarding the fear of extinction. Such an argument maintains that if eternity follows death than the later isn’t really death, and if death is marked by the obliteration of the self than we never really experience it, since experience requires a self. All well and good in terms of the logic, but not quite adequate to the phenomenological question of what death feels like, for what does it mean to experience something defined by an inability to feel (as if listening to a dirge without music)?
Millay inverts the expectations of the memento mori tradition, which the poem clearly is partaking in, by gesturing towards the carpe diem tradition, those two ways of approaching finality forever intertwined in poetic history. This is a poem that, true to memento mori, looks squarely within the vacant black eye-sockets of the skull, where she describes how as regards our departed beloveds, “Into the darkness they go” (from the first stanza), how they will be “one with the dull, indiscriminate dust” (second stanza), how “”They are gone to feed the roses,” (in the third stanza), and that “Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave/Gently they go” (Millay’s final stanza). True to the memento mori perspective, there is an acknowledgement of death, of the finality of the grave, for as Millay says “So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind,” all of that phrased in a sort of temporal Hebraic parallelism which recalls nothing so much as the King James Translation of Ecclesiastes. If there is a carpe diem approach, and that Cavalier attitude is nothing if not memento mori as seen through a mirror darkly, it’s in the narrator’s steadfast refusal to give death dominion. “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground,” she writes, “I am not resigned.”
Like Robert Herrick, like any of the Cavaliers who contemplated the sepulcher, Millay is concerned with issues botanical. This is a poem replete with lilies, laurel, and most of all roses, the last one being that which one should gather while they may. Yet when it comes to the conflation of the floral with the moral, Millay steadfastly refuses consolation. Though the departed may be “Crowned/With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.” If the dead have “gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled…. Fragrant is the blossom,” than Millay still refuses. “More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world,” she writes. This is a poem that in its own way turns cliché against itself, which makes a refusal when it comes to the empty palliative of thought-terminating “answers quick and keen.” For those who trumpet the universality of demise into the “darkness of the grave,” this final resting place for the “beautiful, the tender, the kind…. The intelligent, the witty, the brave,” Millay says she does not approve, as surely as she doesn’t approve of the idea that the dead exist as fertilizer for the beautiful. Nor do the dead live on in any more than a figurative sense, only as a “fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, /A formula, a phrase.”
Soothing to believe the dead endure in this way, but Millay doesn’t countenance it; in her understanding “the best is lost.” Repeatedly Millay professes knowledge of this reality, of death’s universality and the ways in which the living can remember those who’ve died despite their absence, but hers is an utterance athwart the reality of extinction, impossible to stave it off but admirable in its obstinacy. In this way, the work is a profoundly sad poem; but it’s also a tremendous statement of love, certain in the understanding that unallayed grief remains the most complete and honest measure of devotion.
Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily, and Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University. The author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Relic will be released by Bloomsbury Academic in January as part of their Object Lessons series, while Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain will be released by Melville House in July of 2024.
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