Meditations on Mortality

Mike Willock writes: I love poetry – I always have. In this poetry month at Second, three poems come to mind – all of them old, like me.

As aches and pains come and go each day and my mobility decreases, I recall “The One Hoss Shay” (1858) by Oliver Wendell Holmes. The poem is much too long to print here, but the gist is that the Deacon built the shay for the Parson in 1755 so it wouldn’t break down. It had no weak spot – each part was just as strong as the rest. He found the strongest oak and lancewood and ash and whitewood and elm and steel and leather to build it. In 1800 it was good as new and so it stayed until November 1, 1855 when it began to show traces of age. While the Parson was on the way to the meeting house that Sunday morning working on the fifth point of his sermon text he found himself sitting on the ground behind the horse with the shay in bits and pieces all around him.

 …It went to pieces all at once,
All at once, and nothing first,
Just as bubbles do when they burst.
“Just as bubbles do when they burst.”
Logic is logic. That’s all I say.
“End of the wonderful one-hoss shay.“

The second is my favorite – titled “First Fig” from the collection Figs from Thistles (pub. 1920) by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
— It gives a lovely light!

The third is “Thanatopsis” (1821) by William Cullen Bryant, written when he was only 17. The poem is a reflection on the magnificence of Nature and on human mortality – again too long to print. The beginning may be familiar – “To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks a various language;…” But the concluding part of the last stanza I have memorized from my youth:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, 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.

Memories are like that. Now, some may find “Thanatopsis” depressing, even morose. I don’t. For me the point is “So live….that when thy summons comes… trust … and lie down to pleasant dreams.” So live, and may the candle of your life light the way for others and also light the world around you.

God is good. All the time.