When I was in high school in the early 1950s one of
my heroes, as unlikely as it may seem, was the early American poet William
Cullen Bryant who, at the age of seventeen, had written America’s first truly
great poem — and, sadly for Bryant, the greatest poem he himself would ever
write — “Thanatopsis.”
When he was so young Bryant could look at the
fields and woods of his native New England and say, after a brave start, that
one would have much company in death, for earth is “one mighty sepulcher.”
The
golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages.
In no sense are these the immortal heavenly hosts
that Christians looked forward to with “a sure and certain hope” (even when I
was myself young I thought that this phrase was one of the most ironically
ridiculous I had ever heard). No, they are the cold, flaming stars lost in
dwindling space.
All
that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.
Mother Nature seems distinctly unmatronly among
such lines as these: “…the dead are there: / And millions in those solitudes,
since first / The flight of years began, have laid them down / In their last
sleep — the dead reign there alone, / So shalt thou rest, and what if thou
withdraw / In silence from the living, and no friend / Take note of thy
departure? All that breathe / Will share thy destiny.”
The dead are alone, but not lonely; if there is
loneliness in being alive, and in dying alone, take comfort, Bryant says, in
the knowledge that everyone is in the same boat. “Plod on, and each one as
before will chase / His favorite phantom.” His favorite phantom — we live alone with our illusions, with our
romantic solace which, finally, does not cover the bleaching bone.
Though each of us is “a brother to the insensible
rock,” Bryant could say in the same poem — say with a straight face and not be
thought a fool by his contemporaries — “sustained and soothed / By an
unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, / Like one who wraps the drapery of his
couch / About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.” An unfaltering trust in
what? Bryant doesn’t say, he merely suggests that we be Sybarites of darkness.
Walk on your lonely grave by day, and by night pull your Turkish winding sheet
about you. Lie down, dust, with your brother stone, beneath the stars like sand
in the glass of ages.
Thoroughly un-American, if you think about it. If you don’t, if your conscious mind
hears only the uplift while your unconscious mind goes its own irrational way,
how thoroughly American. If
Bryant had lived in the twentieth century, his name would have been Wallace
Stevens.
Well, but still, even if when I was myself
seventeen years of age, I could have articulated all these thoughts and been
able to say, “How ridiculous!” — I admired Bryant for having seen what I did
know even then: that this life is all there is, and I would have liked to be
able to say that I, too, had written a great poem even though it was full of
anomalies, paradoxes and contradictions and published it before I turned
eighteen. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, but I did take a good hard look at
“Thanatopsis” in a poem of my own:
THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN
...to be a brother to the insensible rock....
from "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen
Bryant
To be a brother to the insensible rock
Is what we wear for. Like the hairy man
Knocking flint from canyons, living his span
By granite, never noticing life's wreck,
We come at last to bludgeon dust and find
A home of gravel. Hills beyond this fog
Would indicate the bluff of years. Agog,
We hear Zephyrus say we're of the mind,
Never of clay. Therefore our dunes sift through
The hourglass, their insidious abrasions
Undermining all our stately mansions,
Till brotherhood is heaped on us anew.
"The Brotherhood of Man" was originally published in The University of Kansas City Review, xxv:2, 1958; first collected in First Poems, Francestown: Golden Quill Press, 1960, and re-collected in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, cloth; ISBN 1932842012, paper.
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