This week's poem, Departed, is by the Welsh, Wrexham-born, poet Grahame Davies, and comes from his first collection in English, Lightning Beneath the Sea, just published by Seren Books.
At first sight the poem might appear to be saying something ordinarily elegiac in an ordinary way. Davies is a poet of many skills and shapes: the collection mixes free and tightly formal verse, and only a few poems take the regular quatrain pattern. So it's not the default stanza-form for Davies that it can become for some poets. At the same time, its use here reminds the reader of other elegiac poems – Gray's Elegy, perhaps, also in iambic pentameter and rhymed ABAB. The diction is plain, like that of good prose, the deft verse-carpentry utterly unobtrusive.
But appearances are deceptive, and this poem sets out on a new tack from the start. Read beyond the title, and you realise the speaker is not about to deliver pieties or pleasantries concerning the dear Departed. Far from it. Instead, he wants to explain how real and divisive the departures are, and he's being quite assertive about these views, not cloaking them with imagery. It's refreshing to meet a new poem of ideas. Its images are effective, but, until the last line, illustrative rather than load-bearing.
"They touch our lives much less than we suppose/ the dead" struck me as one of those moments in poetry when a half-thought from the back of your mind (pushed there because it's uncomfortable, perhaps) is brought into the light. You think: yes, of course. I always knew that! But the truth is you didn't – not quite.
This is a young man's poem. Davies himself is in early middle age, and the vision springs from the thick of vigorous life. It's not immature, not heartless. It finds its way to sorrow, and perhaps that's where it began. But it's very much about living – all the necessary trivia, all the essential moving on.
Rilke wrote, with terrifying youthful insight, that everyone has to find his or her own death. That thought comes to mind in the descriptions of the departed through their various claims on the living. The climax of the list, at the end of the second stanza, shows us the lack of moral transformation in the survivors – "we" who've witnessed courage and suffering. With wry, sad humour, the speaker reminds us how we break our pact with the dead "almost the next day".
The theme is pursued in the third stanza. With "the great ones" the poet leads us to look up. Their "spirits wrote in stars across the sky", but, even if those stars are not erased, they are remote. "They count for little, or the truths they taught." There's a sense of disillusion. The trust that death brings transformation is innate in the major religions. It's what Easter for Christians is all about. A legacy of revelation is expected of great religious leaders, and sometimes of ordinary significant people, too. The reluctance to have the door slammed and the story finished is a powerful human instinct. There would be no history, literature or learning without it.
There's further startling insight in the fourth stanza, which looks back to the earth to "the least beloved human face". Again, not the face we expect in a conventional elegy. The living count more than the dead. More than that – the least loved is worth more than the most loved, if the former is alive and the latter dead.
The poem turns at this point. It has seemed an anti-hymn, despite its stately iambic rhythms. Now it seems to shift into a mode more emotionally celebratory, more truly hymn-like. The trivial things "that bury sadness" also "sing" – they project a living line beyond it. The song (perhaps it's "the music of what happens") is all-important, although, the poem admits, the singing itself is tragic, "in a way". It's almost an aside, this small, qualified point, but it's essential to the perspective. The drive of "creation" to survive is closely connected with death. Its songs are finite, its hunger to sing them full of pathos.
The images in the last stanza are simple and striking. Creation sighs and sings, and in a further personification, "the daily sunlight" stares (the sun shining alike on the just and the unjust). The suggestion that the portrait is fading faster than "the painted frame" continues those earlier revaluations concerning loved faces.
The sun and the wind also frame the human image and emphasise its frailty. And yet, finally, the significance of "the loved-one's lonely, lichen-covered name" is inescapable. "Lonely" implies other words, names, gravestones, which have vanished: this name itself is hidden by a more time-rich life-form – lichen. The melody of the line intensifies with the angle of vision. There's gentle alliteration elsewhere ("patience"/ "pain", "spirits"/ "stars"/ "sky", "truths they taught", "sighs"/ "sings"). With the last line's heavier alliteration, the voice rises to a lament, but keeps its homely register: "loved one", "lonely", "lichen-covered" are hardly recondite terms.
Davies is perhaps a religious poet, but he evades "organised" religion. His speakers quietly wait and watch, keeping a "less-deceived" eye on what is, and letting the observations move as they will to epiphany or moral insight. It may be far-fetched to think a primarily Welsh writer could be influenced by Philip Larkin, but Larkin is the poet he most reminds me of: a writer not afraid of the big themes, but not pretentious about them, and not afraid of the ordinary, but alert to the measure of its significance.
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Departed
They touch our lives much less than we suppose,
the dead. The ones who swore they'd never leave,
but did so. Those who slipped away and those
we said we'd miss, but didn't really grieve.
The ones who, with their patience or their pain,
left us resolved we'd live a different way;
to never lie, or slander, or complain;
although we did so, almost the next day.
The great ones, even, known or by report,
whose spirits wrote in stars across the sky;
they count for little, or the truths they taught;
they bring us no new wisdom when they die.
We don't admit it, even when it's clear,
the way the least beloved human face
is more to us than those no longer here,
the ones we said no others could replace.
It's not the tragic, but the trivial things
that bury sadness deeper every day;
not how creation sighs, but how it sings
though that itself is tragic, in a way.
The daily sunlight staring through the glass.
The portrait fading in the painted frame.
The wind that goes, ungrieving, through the grass.
The loved one's lonely, lichen-covered name.
Grahame Davies