[Suzanne Doyle]

Clearly you don't need any help from me to have a lively discussion on this topic, but I'll toss in a couple of my favorite acts of quiet despair.

When Alicia mentioned Thomas Hardy, "Wind and Rain" immediately leaped to mind:

Wind and Rain

They sing their dearest songs --
He, she, all of them -- yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

They clear the creeping moss --
Elders and juniors -- aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!

They are blithely breakfasting all --
Men and maidens -- yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee....
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them -- aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

Somewhere I once read that despair is the feeling that greets us when we can see no way out, whether the situation is physical or psychological. Death is an obvious subject. In Hardy's poem the concrete detail is so unique, and so lovingly chosen that we can see that family as if it was our own, so the irreconcilable loss ploughed by the rain-drop in the last line knocks the wind out us. The first time I read this poem I literally gasped.

Ed Shaklee also mentioned Cunningham's poem "To My Wife." Now there's a quiet despair that doesn't welcome us in but does illuminate love and loss all the same. I think it bears repeating here:

To My Wife

And does the heart grow old? You know
In the indiscriminate green
Of summer or in earliest snow
A landscape is another scene,

Inchoate and anonymous,
And every rock and bush and drift
As our affections alter us
Will alter with the season's shift.

So love by love we come at last,
As through the exclusions of a rhyme,
Or the exactions of a past,
To the simplicity of time,

The antiquity of grace, where yet
We live in terror and delight
With love as quiet as regret
And love like anger in the night.

I have a problem with light at the end of the tunnel in general. In most poems it seems as contrived to me in verse as it does in life. I hope someone will take this opportunity to prove me wrong. Most of Richard Wilbur's poems try, but this is the weak spot for me with his work. Rhina, bring it!