[Ed Shacklee]

"Team Quiet Despair" -- that sounds about right. Thank you, Suzanne.

I was starting out to post "I Am," by John Clare, because of the lines,

Even the dearest, that I love the best,
Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.

Instead, here's one by Robert Penn Warren, not a poet I usually associate with this mood:



The Cross

Once, after storm, I stood at the cliff-head,
And up black basalt the sea’s white claws
Still flung their eight fathoms to have my blood.
In the blaze of new sun they leap in cruel whiteness,
Not forgiving me that their screaming lunges
Had nightlong been no more than a dream
In the tangle and warmth of breathless dark
Of love’s huddle and sleep, while stars were black
And the tempest swooped down to snatch our tiles.

By three, wind down and sun still high,
I walked the beach of the little cove
Where scavengings of the waves were flung –
Old oranges, cordage, a bottle of beer
With the cap still tight, a baby-doll
But the face smashed in, a boom from some mast,
And most desperately hunched by volcanic stone
As though trying to cling in some final hope,
But drowned hours back you can be damned sure,
The monkey, wide-eyed, bewildered yet
By the terrible screechings and jerks and bangs,
And no friend to come by and just say ciao.

I took him up, looked in his eyes,
As orbed as dark aggies, as bright as tears,
With a glaucous glint in deep sightlessness,
Yet still seeming human with all they had seen –
Like yours or mine, if luck had run out.

So, like a fool, I say ciao to him.

Under the wet fur I felt how skin slid loose
On poor little bones, and the delicate
Fingers yet grasped, at God knew what.
So I sat with him there, watching wind abate.
No funnel on the horizon showed.
And of course, no sail. And the cliff’s shadow
Had found the cove. Well, time to go.

I took time, yes, to bury him,
In a scraped-out hole, little cairn on top.
And I enough fool to improvise
A cross –

Two sticks tied together to prop in the sand.

But what use is that? The sea comes back.

[Maryann Corbett]

I keep wanting to contribute poems to this thread yet failing to find anything that I think exactly meets the requirements. The gold standard is a poem that's new to many of us and that is both low-key and utterly without hope. Maybe because of where I live, I often look to poems about winter to find that mood.

Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man" is certainly silent and hopeless, but we all know it, I think. And I spent some time thinking about Richard Wilbur's "Year's End" but decided that, although there's plenty of stillness and death and resignation in it, there's also an undercurrent of hope for "more time" because the New Year does, at the end, ring in.

Does this one fit the bill?

Traveling through the Dark
by William Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.


The fact that the poet takes time to decide seems to say that some other choice was thinkable, and that he did think about it. So this is the moment of resignation rather than utter despair, but it certainly captures a moment when hope was given up.

[Martin Elster]

I haven't had a chance to read much of this thread yet, but I just happened to see this and I'm glad you posted this poem, Maryann. I've read it before and I thank you for refreshing my memory. It's disturbingly real.

Martin

[Maryann Corbett]

Glad to be of service, Martin. There are so many above that really seize me.

I should have mentioned that many of my favorite quietly desperate poems are Joshua Mehigan's, and I'm keeping mum about them so as not to steal any thunder from Jeff, who has said he plans to talk about Josh's poems.

[David Anthony]

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote some very despairing poems. I'm not sure if they could be called quiet though.

NO worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

[Ed Shacklee]

It's not easy to gauge how much quiet and how much despair is needed to fit snugly into this category. "Sparrows on a Hillside Drift" is the poem by James Wright that first came to mind, but here's another:


To a Friend Condemned to Prison

Long I have seen those eyes,
Alert, astonished, bright,
Turn softly and survey
The girl in the falling light,
Or see down lucid skies
Soft bodies shift away.

Now, in the peopled dark,
Where hands make love to stone,
The shimmering vision falls,
The flesh lies down alone.
Only the mind hangs stark
Above the curving walls.

Hold to the mind, and die! –
Is all I say or know.
Yet you, embracing grief,
Father its children now.
Forgiving, proud, you lie
With murderer, pervert, thief:

Nothing to do but keep
The body beaten down,
The clothing clean and frayed.
Nothing to do but drown
The blood in its own sleep,
And bid the heart lie dead.

[Mary Meriam]

Ed, I especially love this last stanza -

Nothing to do but keep
The body beaten down,
The clothing clean and frayed.
Nothing to do but drown
The blood in its own sleep,
And bid the heart lie dead.


The meter reminds me of the Mew I posted -

Wait with their old wise patience for the heavenly rain,
Sure of the sky: sure of the sea to send its healing breeze,
Sure of the sun, and even as to these
Surely the Spring, when God shall please,
Will come again like a divine surprise


Perhaps this is the rhythm of quiet despair. I've often thought that the main reason I read and write poems is for comfort. Like Suzanne, I've known a lot of despair, and poems were often my only comfort. Petra said the Mew poem sounds hopeful; I'm not so sure. I think it's a poem that captures a despairing poet attempting to comfort herself. Since the poem is about WWI, Mew is also attempting to comfort the victims of war.

[Kevin Corbett]

I can think of a few poems, some of them very well done, that might express something like "quiet despair". But then again, I cannot like. The Church says despair is a sin, and I agree. So while I can read such poems and appreciate their power, it's still just a walk through the Wood of Suicides, whose only purpose is to serve as an instruction on how one must not be.

[Ed Shacklee]

Here's one by William Blake --



The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door,
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore;
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

[Jeff Holt]

Well, I said that I would get around to Philip Larkin, and I finally am. I don't believe any discussion on poetry of quiet despair (emphasis on "quiet") would be sufficient without his work. I'm only going to speak briefly about the two poems I have selected, esp. since there is so much fine criticism about Larkin out there, but I encourage other Larkin lovers to post their own favorites. Here is the first, very famous, one:

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.


To me, this poem better represents despair and naked fear in the face of the inevitability of death than any other poem I know. And yet, as in all of his poems, Larkin manages to talk about his subjects rather matter of factly, or "quietly." My favorite line in this poem is "Most things may never happen; this one will." That line drives home the inevitability of what we all must face both through its diction and through its punctuation and rhythm. We have the plain spoken sentence preceding the semi-colon, then the three words, all emphatic due either to their placement in the line or, in the case of "one," due to the fact that it is a noun.

The first time I read "Aubade," I felt an actual shiver of fear, and felt that I had expanded my vision, suddenly seeing all the hustle and bustle of American life as merely different versions of running from death. And, at first, I wanted my blinders back!

This second poem by Larkin is even more subdued than "Aubade," but still, certainly, quietly despairing:

Home is So Sad

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.


When I was already familiar with Larkin's most popular poems, such as "Aubade," "Church Going" and "This be the verse," Josh Mehigan emailed me this poem. I was struck immediately by the first four words, and how they contradict what people usually think of when they think of "home." Reading it again, I'm fascinated, throughout the poem, by the narrator, because he is actually talking in second person, as readers discover in lines 8-10. It's almost as if Larkin is a detective, showing us around a deserted house in order to tell us "don't come here." But it is the very details in the last 2 lines that drive home the despair: "the pictures and cutlery," in line 9, make me imagine pictures of a family, smiling together, gathering dust, and cutlery laid out on a dining table doing the same. I am wondering, what happened to this family? If this weren't enough, Larkin continues in line 10 with "The music in the piano stool. That vase." For me, "That vase," standing alone as a two word sentence fragment and as the fragmented ending of the poem, drives home the sadness of the house very effectively, because the vase is standing alone, as, now, everything in the house is. When the family still lived there, their presence united all of the material things, but now, despite some things in the house being "(s)haped to the comfort of the last to go," the individual items in the house are fragmented and without purpose.

The poem certainly invites further speculation; I'm tempted to think more about the fragmentation of the family based upon the line "the last to go," and wonder if there was an actual "theft," or if the theft is merely a symbolic way of stating the house's loss of the family. However, I feel that is enough commentary from me. If anyone else would like to chime in, though, feel free!