The Solace of Words When “There Are No Words . . .”

      “There are no words . . .” has become the watchword phrase over recent days.  But there are words, of course.  There always are words.  However, when an event is so alien to what we understand as human, all the words that we can think of, the ones that flash through our mind and vault to our mouth are halted or clamped down on because they are so unequal to the task—unworthy words to utter over the slaughtered bodies of the innocent young.  I have had lines from poems sound in my ear, poems that have always calmed and comforted me. And they do serve.  For during much of the time that we have followed this horror, all I saw and heard in the core of my heart was the face and voice of my granddaughter, recently turned one.  She is a new life force in our family, and she opens my grief for the searing, soul-shaking loss of the parents and families in Newtown.  

          When I was a classroom teacher, I made a regular attempt to teach the “tragic vision” in literature.  It was the single most difficult concept to convey.  Young students, albeit bright and serious about their work, struggled with the notion that all of human life is circumscribed by mortality—none of us escapes alive.  Prospero in Shakespeare’s "The Tempest” cautions that “[w]e are such stuff as dreams are made on/ and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”  The deaths of children have also been the subject of poems. The boy in Robert Frost’s “Out, Out” whose hand is severed by the saw is described in his last moments.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.

No more to build on there.

 

   John Crowe Ransom’s account of the girl’s wake in “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” etches her stately dignity: “In one house we are sternly stopped/ To say we are vexed at her brown study, / Lying so primly propped.”

 

   Almost all poets have written about children, and all parents have experienced what the President referred to as “that fierce and boundless love we feel for them,” so we grieve with and pray for those mothers and fathers, grandparents, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles who have in a singular way been left widowed, in the core of that word’s meaning, to be left behind by death; in this case, deaths caused by the crazed carnage of “foul and most unnatural murder.”  The talk that is now ongoing—is important talk, of actions to take, security systems to strengthen, the need to advance the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness.  We have no dearth of bright and good people to lead this movement, and a movement is what it will take because we do have to change.  When we better protect ourselves and our children, we do not engage solely in an honorable and essential enterprise.  We do what is right and righteous; we excoriate the senseless and seize the sanctity of our holy innocents: Charlotte. Daniel. Olivia. Josephine. Ana. Dylan. Madeleine. Catherine. Chase. Jesse. James. Grace. Emilie. Jack. Noah. Caroline. Jessica. Benjamin. Avielle. Allison.  Their adult guardians died trying to save them:  Mary. Anne Marie. Dawn. Rachel. Victoria. Lauren.  We need to write their names.  We need to say their names.  And, to sustain our resolve, we can include the solace of words “when there are no words.”  We need to call for the poems we have in the muscle memory of our head or heart and submit to their succor.  What seems to be staying with me are these concluding lines to “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas.

 

                    Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

     In the sun born over and over,

          I ran my heedless ways,

     My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

     Before the children green and golden

          Follow him out of grace,

 

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

     In the moon that is always rising,

          Nor that riding to sleep

     I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

          Time held me green and dying

     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

 

   I have always read aIoud, texts in classroom, scripture and eulogies in sanctuary, and declamations in my own home.  But I doubt I could hold together, reading these stanzas.  Not when I see the children’s faces.  Not when I hear their parents try to speak.  Sunt lacrimae rerum.   It would take someone whose composure is rooted in rock.  And who would that be among any of us?  May all of us, the living and the left, rest in peace.