Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems Book

Is it possible to be a literate teenage girl and not become somewhat obsessed with death poetry? I still remember finding Richard Brautigan's 'Castle of the Cormorants' as an 18 year-old, and discovering a hitherto unknown gothic side to myself, that was bewitched by its sexy dark fragile magic:

Hamlet with
a cormorant
under his arm
married Ophelia.
She was still
wet from drowning.
She looked like
a white flower
that had been
left in the
rain too long
I love you,
said Ophelia,
and I love
that dark
bird you
hold in
your arms.

Brautigan doesn't appear in Bloom's anthology; neither does E.E. Cummings, despite his frequent, friendly invocations of death

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis
[From 'since feeling is first']

and another favourite, 'suppose'

Life is an old man carrying flowers on his head.

young death sits in a cafe
smiling, a pierce of money held between
his thumb and first finger

(i say "will he buy flowers" to you
and "Death is young
life wears velour trousers
life totters, life has a beard" i

say to you who are silent.--"Do you see
Life? he is there and here,
or that, or this
or nothing or an old man 3 thirds
asleep, on his head
flowers, always crying
to nobody something about les
roses les bluets
yes,
will He buy?
Les belles bottes--oh hear
, pas cheres")

and my love slowly answered I think so. But
I think I see someone else

there is a lady, whose name is Afterwards
she is sitting beside young death, is slender;
likes flowers.

'Till I End My Song' is not a collection of poems about death however. Bloom lays out his selection criteria in his very enjoyable introduction. Some are literally last poems. Some were written by the poets to mark the end, though they may have continued to live and write for a while. And others mark 'an imaginative conclusion to a poetic career.' All, he states firmly, are present because of their 'artistic excellence'.

Bloom doesn't go straight for the obvious choices. Dylan Thomas is represented not by 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night', but by 'Poem on His Birthday'; Auden not by 'Funeral Blues' ("Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone") but by 'A Lullaby', a far more curious, intimate and unsettling thing.

The poems are all by English and American writers (reflecting Bloom's areas of interest and expertise, I assume, but leaving a howling gap where you wonder how Japanese or Scandinavian or Indian poets approach these topics). The collection opens with Edmund Spenser's 'Prothalamion', a poem written for the double wedding of the daughters of his patrons good friend, and from which the book takes its title ('Against their Brydale day, which was long long; Sweet Themmes run softly till I end my Song') and ends with the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali's 'The Veiled Suite'.

Each poem is introduced with a page or less of text, where Bloom offers a thumbnail sketch of the poet's life and their literary context, and some clues as to how you may approach the poem. Often he relates his personal connection to the poem and, with the more recent writers, the poets themselves. Just shy of 80, Bloom is open about his own motivation for making such an anthology at this point in his career, and writes in his introduction about this:

Myself seventy-nine years of age, I grieve still for many of these poets who were my friends. But knowledge, not pathos, is my purpose in gathering this anthology. Lastness is a part of knowing.

Bloom also discusses the overlap between 'last poems' and 'death poems', and notes the influence upon him of Epicurus and his disciple Lucretius. He traces a heritage of Lucretian poetry in English writing, and describes it thus:

Epicurus and Lucretius had many ambitions, but the largest was to free us from fears of death, which for them in itself was nothing at all. Liberated from heaven and hell, purgatory and limbo, we were to benefit from the demythologizing of death, be it magnified by pagans or by Christians. Dying comes to all, but "death" to no one. What Stevens called "the mythology of modern death" seems to have little force in the twenty-first century, which follows the century of the Holocaust and other unforgivable barbarities. In so bad a time, when nations and regions alike begin to seem organised incoherences, Lucretian poems are refreshing in their difference.

Having never formally studied English Lit, I'm still not sure how to parse Bloom's statement here. As an inexperienced reader, it is interesting how the poems seem to move over the course of five centuries from a shared, even social conception of death to a more private, more inwardly focused one. This may reflect, of course, the role poetry has played over that time: today, reading poetry is largely a private activity, conducted alone behind closed doors, whereas one of the poems Bloom includes, Ben Jonson's 'Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue', from the early 17th century, was written to be sung as part of a play/dance masque.

Reading through the book, I felt most stirred by the works from the early part of the 20th century (although I will spare a special mention for William Morris's 'The Story of Sigurd the Volsung', from which Bloom extracts the revenge song of Gudrun: "There was none to hinder Gudrun, and the fire-blast scathed her nought / For the ways of the Norn she wended, and her feet from the wrack they brought"). And with that, my five favourite poems.

Edward Thomas (1878-1917) 'Liberty'

The last light has gone out of the world, except
This moonlight lying on the grass like frost
Beyond the brink of the tall elm's shadow.
It is as if everything else had slept
Many an age, unforgotten and lost -
The men that were, the things done, long ago,
All I have thought; and but the moon and I
Live yet and here stand idle over a grave
Where all is buried. Both have liberty
To dream what we could do if we were free
To do some thing we had desired long,
The moon and I. There's none less free than who
Does nothing and has nothing else to do,
Being free only for what is not to his mind,
And nothing is to his mind. If every hour
Like this one passing that I have spent among
The wiser others when I have forgot
To wonder whether I was free or not,
Were piled before me, and not lost behind,
And I could take and carry them away
I should be rich; or if 1 had the power
To wipe out every one and not again
Regret, I should be rich to be so poor.
And yet I still am half in love with pain,
With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,
With things that have an end, with life and earth,
And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.

Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) 'The Lonely Death'

In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In waters of ice; myself
Will shiver, and shrive myself,
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;
I will shutter the windows from light,
I will place in their sockets the four
Tall candles and set them a-flame
In the grey of the dawn; and myself
Will lay myself straight in my bed,
And draw the sheet under my chin.

Elinor Wylie (1885-1928) 'Ejaculation'**

In this short interval to tear
The living words from dying air,
To pull them to me, quick and brave
As swordfish from a silver wave,
To drag them dripping, cold and salt
To suffocation in this vault
To which the lid of vapour shuts,
To shake them down like hazel-nuts
Or golden acorns from an oak
Whose twigs are flame above the smoke,
To snatch them suddenly from dust
Like apples flavoured with the frost
Of mountain valleys marble-cupped,
To leap to them and interrupt
Their flight that cleaves the atmosphere
As white and arrowy troops of deer
Divide the forest, - make my words
Like feathers torn from living birds!

Stevie Smith (1902-1971) 'Black March'

I have a friend
At the end
Of the world.
His name is a breath

Of fresh air.
He is dressed in
Grey chiffon. At least
I think it is chiffon.
It has a
Peculiar look, like smoke.

It wraps him round
It blows out of place
It conceals him
I have not seen his face.

But I have seen his eyes, they are
As pretty and bright
As raindrops on black twigs
In March, and heard him say:

I am a breath
Of fresh air for you, a change
By and by.

Black March I call him
Because of his eyes
Being like March raindrops
On black twigs.

(Such a pretty time when the sky
Behind black twigs can be seen
Stretched out in one
Uninterrupted
Cambridge blue as cold as snow.)

But this friend
Whatever new names I give him
Is an old friend. He says:

Whatever names you give me
I am
A breath of fresh air,
A change for you.

[**The devil in me is thinking of requesting 'Ejaculation' as a funeral poem, simply for the sake of having the word printed in the order of service]

I have been reading Harold Bloom for over 30 years now, ever since I borrowed The Anxiety of Influence from my college library and forgot to return it.

And I enjoy his writing, his vast knowledge, his love of reading, his love of the canon, his appreciation for knowledge and all things that contribute to a better life. I don't always understand some of his Freudian angles toward poetry and poets, but he is still a vast and enjoyable ocean of literature to jump into periodically.

Till I End My Song is about last poems. Not always the final poem written by a poet (in some cases, yes), but poems that look at impending mortality and what lies beyond.

The selection is diverse, but does stay with his mostly favorite canon poets. I recommend this book as much for some of the poems as I do for the introduction he writes for each one. These intros are only a couple of pages long, but give a terrific insight into the life and work of each poet, and why he selected the poems. My favorite selection was a beautiful poem by John Donne, but I enjoyed Bloom's writing as much about each poet.

If you want to learn about poets, this is a good introduction. A last look of poems, but a first look at writers to learn from, and Bloom is one of the best teachers there is.