[RCrawford]

Valediction Against Mourning


Christ, I see you’re finished lying here.
You tried everything to get me off
and go. It was distressing how you coughed,
until you stopped. Sweet, I’ll leave you somewhere
safe, I swear. Nearby. You’ll never need
to wonder why I brought you to my stale
crib, made you show your age until your nails
tore ragged hours down my chest. Don’t bleed
so fast, Dear. I’ve been your chaperone,
a steady hand to waltz you through some songs
of stuff that conquers all and makes us one.
I’m touched, grateful that you’ve come along
– just to feel the long arm of a grown
man’s relief. I’d never do you wrong.

[RCrawford]

Less traditional. ABBACDDCEFEFGG. Slant rhymes. And CREEPY. I chose this one because it was effective. I wanted to call the police after reading it. TWISTED. I thought I saw in it an allusion to Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz.” Not to mention countless horror stories. Do I believe the narrator could even try to mourn? No. The use of enjambments serve to heighten the tension “…get me off/and go,” “somewhere/safe, I swear” but it’s the language that really establishes the psycho portrait: he is “distressed” that she’s stopped breathing (coughing); he believes he has been her “chaperone,” and the disturbing use of the word “finished” in the first line. I didn’t want to think about this poem, but I did. Good work.

[Catherine Chandler]

Of course, it's quite a departure from Donne's poem of the similar title. Really creepy, as the DG has written, and effective.

[Edmund Conti]

Christ, you start off like that and you get me all tense. Creepy, but a good creepy.

[Susan McLean]

I respectfully disagree with the DG's assessment of the rhyme scheme. The sestet is EFEFEF, so it is a modified Petrarchan sonnet, which fits the warped love theme. Though I agree that the content is creepy, I find the meter unpleasantly ragged and the enjambments often awkward. The title is also slightly off. Donne's poem is "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," which makes sense. I don't see how one can have a valediction against mourning. So, on the whole, I am not wild about this one.

Susan

[Mary Meriam]

This rape and murder of a child (?), evil vs innocence, is a metaphor for the Crucifixion? But then why "crib?" I start thinking about Christ in the manger. Christ, Sweet, Dear... what a sicko. This part "some songs / of stuff that conquers all and makes us one" is either the language of love songs or religion. I'm not sure what to make of it, but studying it is making me feel sick.

[Gillie Chriosd]

Yes, this rape and murder is a Crucifixion metaphor. Let's get a little past our religious convictions and consider the poem on its own terms. In fairness, do you consider T. S. Eliot's adaptation of Christ's journey to Emmaus in The Waste Land sacrilegious? Or his invocation of Buddhist scripture ("Shantih shantih shantih")?

I love poems like this. I go to poetry for otherness. I don't want a "safe" poem that coddles my prior notions, which the writer can only guess at anyway.

This poem really takes after Frank Bidart's "Herbert White." First person. Yes, he's a sicko -- that's the point. We're experiencing a frightening psychology, all the more frightening because it's also tender toward the dying "you."

The rhymes are rabble-rousers. True to the voice and the religious context, they jerk and jar you with connections you want to resist, e.g. "get me off" / "how you coughed."

My complaint is that in the first two quatrains -- or octet: how does one think of this mishmash of Shakespearean and Petrarchan schemes? -- everything feels like a turn. "Nearby," for instance, brilliant as it is in its understatement, follows a little too closely on "somewhere / safe" to fully get the effect it's aiming for. Once we get into the sestet (EFEFEF, I agree), the sailing gets smoother. Until then, we're in a constantly distracted limbo.

Or, again, is that where we're supposed to be?

"Of stuff that conquers all and makes us one." ... "Stuff" feels weak for this line, but damn. In this killer's imagination, his victim's death is a moment of transcendent identification. Hence the Crucifixion metaphor? For him, Christ's blood, given for the salvation of mankind, is blood that must be shed again and again? "I'd never do you wrong": his victims are sacrificial lambs? He feels it's his obligation to shed the blood?

It's hard to imagine things getting more twisted than this. If posting Bake-off sonnets in pairs is meant to be any kind of an endorsement for competition, "Valediction Against Mourning" gets the -- and the !

(Yes, the title needs tweaking.)

[Scott Miller]

This poem brings up all kinds of questions about aesthetics and morality that are absolutely fascinating. In Browning's "My Last Duchess", there's something seductive in the voice of the narrator that makes his murderous behavior seem charmingly roguish rather than psychotic. The narrator in "Valediction Against Morning" isn't charming at all. He's terrifying.

Susan, I agree with your identification of the sestet, and your assessment that the meter is "jagged", but that feels intentional to me—and it suits this voice well. It would not be as convincing with a smoother prosody. I'd like to hear Kiefer Sutherland read it in his Dark City character, if anyone gets the reference Anyway, the use of "stuff" is a bland choice but I think the idea is that N won't mention "love" (what "conquers all") due to his pathology.

Mary, it makes me queasy too. I have a two-year-old whose blond ringlets look like a halo when the sun catches them. Why do moral people write in the voices of tyrants, murderers and pedophiles? Is it speculative psychotherapy? Shock value? I hate to use a commercial term like "value", or even something as directed as "purpose", but it's hard for me not to read this and ask "why?".

Which brings me to... Gillie, my qualms aren't about the religious imagery—I'm not even Christian—but the moral dimension. There isn't a significant religious or secular philosophy that approves of the behavior described in the poem. But I think you are centering on the idea that N is conveying, which is something to the effect of, "You were Christ to the sins of my humanity, therefore it is improper to mourn you. Instead, I should thank you for bearing the weight of my iniquities [and maybe absolving them too?]." Or put it this way: if Christ had to die to save the world, weren't his killers doing a very great good?

If I had to answer my own question ("why?"), I would probably argue that the understanding of guilt, transference, psychosis, whatever is going on here, makes it worth reading. I don't know that I'd agree with me though.

Christ, that's enough for me on this one. I'm going to go check on my sleeping son.

[ross hamilton hill]

I don't find it creepy. I read 'crib' as slang for home.
Wrote a crit but deleted it, I'll give it more reads, it's got a lot going for it.

[Janice D. Soderling]

This is astounding, masterly, so well-crafted that I hardly know where to begin.

Perhaps by saying that it is a resonating poem—full of echoes, hidden meanings, doors opening to doors but with no real exit that allows escape.

For me, one of keys to understanding it is the careful selection of words that hold several simultaneous meanings. In common parlance, it is the context that gives meaning. We readers decide as we merrily read along, yes, no, no, yes. But in this poem, it is less certain what meaning is meant in a number of words; we must entertain the several meanings simultaneously, and as with the twisted reasoning of a child's murderer or of a god we cannot understand, we flail in darkness, we lose our foothold, we become terrified.

I would not change the title. Remember that "valediction" means "a leave-taking" (vale dicere, 'to say farewell') and the message in the title is "now we must part, (my sweet), and I am not sorry for what I have done". At the same time, the context is such that one cannot other than think "malediction" (to speak evil). An added fillip is this title's proximity to the Donne title of the poem that compares the lovers' parting to death (and opening another door, to the concept of la petite mort, and the many doors in that room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort ).

Now on to the poem itself. I could write an entire essay on this, but will try to restrain myself, skipping some of the more obvious features and tropes.

There is an echo of Donne in this: some songs / of stuff that conquers all and makes us one.

(Donne: Our two souls therefore, which are one, / Though I must go, endure not yet / A breach,)

Even the most insensitive will hear the echoes of "love conquers all" and "one in Christ" and Prospero's "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."

Stuff. Another of those purselike words stuffed with (forgive the pun) many gold coins of meaning. For "stuff" incorporates the ideas of "substance—material of which something is made", here corporeality, physical bodies, "worthless objects", "specific talk or action", "special capabilities", and the violent "to force, shove, or squeeze". Not to mention the vulgar meaning just under the surface of "stuff" as "sexual intercourse".

Consider also "chaperone", the meaning of which is not the everyday image of a persistent old aunty who tags along behind lovers so they do not steal a kiss, but which actually means "A guide or companion whose purpose is to ensure propriety or restrict activity".

The substance of the poem is (to my mind) no more gruesome than many of the religious undertones of Christianity, "this is my body, this is my blood, eat, drink". Even as a child I abhorred the evangelistic idea of being washed in lamb's blood.

The wall between religious and sexual ecstasy is thinner than we like to think, consider the bacchanals or the Freudian utterances of St. Teresa.

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it...

We hear echoes also of Frankie and Johnny, "I'd never do you wrong", the rejected lover's final capture of the rejecting party.

And the creepy reasoning of Humbert Humbert, or the weirdos recently come to light who held women captive for reasons a normal mind cannot fathom. If these evildoers were caught, how many are never caught. It is too awful to think about, the missing children, where are they, are they alive or dead? Such thoughts are always dwelling under the surface of our contemporary consciousness, pre-preparing us for the aspect/impact/wham-in-the-solar-plexus that this poem delivers.

With respect to Gillie (hearty welcome to the Sphere, Gillie, and thanks for excellent and enjoyable reflections), but I respectfully disagree with your dislike of "nearby". Consider the sonics of that line:

safe, I swear. Nearby. You’ll never need

It is loaded with scary "s" sounds and nefarious "nnnnn" sounds that reinforce the scary and nefarious meaning of the words chosen.

There is more, but that will do for today.

Is the theme religious? God excusing himself for killing his son? Or secular, a creepy pedophile who has raped and murdered a young boy or girl? Only the poet knows, and perhaps not even the poet knows! (I have my suspicions about who the author might be.)

Whew! What a poem!