“Maybe,” Howe writes, “there is some not yet understood return to people we have loved and lost. I need to imagine the possibility even if I don’t believe it” (17). These poems mark the impossible necessity of imagination; Howe returns to her husband—she returns to the Edwards family—through these barely legible textual collages. Her reading—of her husband’s autopsy report, his emails, the detritus that catches her eye as she wrestles with the reality of his death, the paintings of Poussin and the art historian T. J. Clarke’s reflections on those paintings—and what she makes of them in her writing are the return:

This sixth sense of another reality even in simplest objects is what poets set out to show but cannot once and for all.

If there is an afterlife, then we still might: if not, not. (34)

This is the background against which I want to talk about how we die now, those of us who are no longer Christian. I am interested in how we approach the difficulty of death, our own and that of others, and how difficult literature, writing it and reading it, might be a training ground for approaching the difficulties of death—and of life. I will speak in terms of what Michael Warner calls “ethical secularism,” a version of secularism which asks how we live now, those of us for whom religious practices are no longer formative. In Warner’s words, “It presents itself as a project for becoming the kind of person who can rightly recognize the conditions of existence, and although it is an attempt to overcome Christianity it does not secure its stance as a privileged default against the particularities of religion.”² I’d like to say that I don’t wish to overcome Christianity. I’d like to say that death demands particularity. But for me, as for many others, Christianity is simply—but there is nothing simple about it—gone.

When I think about religion and what we grandiosely call literature, I am less interested in the exploration of religious themes or images than in the analogies and disanalogies between literary practices and religious practices of writing and reading. The practices of religious elites—and increasingly not only elites—in Western Christianity circled endlessly around the Psalms, with reading, recitation, song, and meditation leading to the production of new songs in and through engagement with the biblical text. In medieval monastic life, monks and nuns, either individually or in community, enact the continual praise of God that is heaven itself through their recitation or singing of the Psalms. For John Cassian, a key figure in the development and theorization of Christian monasticism in the Latin West, the techniques of repetition central to the monastic life are not at odds with, but themselves produce, spontaneity.

Dying and dead monks and nuns are surrounded by their communities, who recite or sing the Psalter over them. By the High and the late Middle Ages, these practices have moved out of the confines of the monastery. The beguines, semireligious women living lives dedicated to God and Christian perfection in the world, were often employed to care for the sick and the dying. This included reciting or singing the Psalms over them, perhaps at times with them. (Did they sing in Latin? The French, Flemish, German, Italian, English vernaculars? Many of the dying may not have understood the words of the song.)

Those raised within Christian and Jewish traditions often forget how difficult the Psalms are—not just formally, but also in their vivid and incredibly complex imagery, in the harshness of the world and the God they depict, in the truths they purport to tell. For early theologians, theorists of the Psalms and literary critics all, and often poets, the Psalms are at the heart of the Christian life because they contain the entire range of human emotion. Through uttering the words of the Psalms and looking from the book of scripture to what Bernard of Clairvaux calls the book of experience, moving back and forth between the two so that the words of the Psalmist become one’s own and emerge, spontaneously, from one’s lips, Christians come to understand who they are, who God is, how they stand, individually and communally, before, with, and in that God.

The Psalms are not my scripture. But since I was a small child I have read religiously; perhaps I have even begun to write that way. And that is what I see, vividly, complexly, difficultly, in the work I love. An (a)typical juxtaposition, from Fanny Howe’s (Susan Howe’s sister) Tis of Thee, chosen (almost) at random (X: African American Man; Y: European American Woman; Z: Their grown son):

X: and Z:
Any discussion of race is really a discussion about the creation of the universe.

Y:
Now I believe that when the Messiah comes the world will have no images,
since the image will be cut free
from the object, released like beef from a cow,
and competition will automatically founder
as an instinct, having no visible object in sight.
Then on that day I won’t have to look for you in order to know you. (60–61)³

I don’t believe in the messiah, but I believe in Fanny and Susan Howe. What does that make me?

♦♦♦

I have a fantasy, that when I am dying, someone will read to me the opening pages of The Portrait of a Lady.

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do—the situation is itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. . . . Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for some hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.

There are three men on the lawn in Henry James’s not so very innocent scene, an old man and two considerably younger—a father, a son, the son’s friend. (And two dogs, a collie and a “bristling, bustling terrior” who only later, in passing, we will find to be named Bunchy. All of the names come later.)

Daniel Touchett and his son Ralph are both dying.

Their history, and that of the young woman who comes to join them, may seem simple, even banal. How can one speak of eternity with respect to an afternoon tea? (A little eternity and hence no eternity at all; and yet, beyond the irony and the boredom, on this occasion “an eternity of pleasure.”)

I found myself thinking about this scene in James and about my own imaginary deathbed scene, during which I am remembering James or listening to some unspecified person reading James to me, while reading David Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless.⁴ Orr wants to argue against the notion that poetry needs to be something grand, dealing with the sublime and the eternal, in order to be interesting and worth spending one’s time on. Poetry, he writes “seems beautifully pointless, or pointlessly beautiful, depending on your level of optimism” (187). (An afternoon tea on a beautiful lawn dipping down to the Thames. James refuses to leave its beauty alone.)

Orr’s line marks the end of a section; a new one begins, the penultimate one of the book.

My father died of cancer in March of 2007, as I was beginning work on this book. He was sixty-one. It’s difficult to type those sentences for many reasons, not least among them the fact that I’ve been a book critic for over a decade now, and almost always find myself cringing during the inevitable fetch-me-a-tissue moment in any personal essay or memoir. Still, throughout this book . . . I’ve tried to suggest what a relationship with poetry actually looks like. . . . I’d be falling short if I didn’t try to offer some sense of what—for me—poetry has proven it can and cannot give. Sad as it may be, we often discover the true contours of any relationship in the situations that matter most to us; and sadder still, those situations tend to be ones in which something we love is lost, or in danger of being lost. So pull out your tissues, and let’s talk about it. (187–88)

“Cancer,” Orr writes, “can kill you in many ways” (188). His father had a stroke in the midst of (and likely caused by) chemotherapy. The stroke left Orr’s father partially paralyzed and unable to shift the pace, intonation, or stress of his words. Suffering from what is sometimes called “flat affect” (surely a misnomer—the voice is flat, but is the affect? perhaps it’s just easier to think that what we can’t hear isn’t there), his father couldn’t “slow down and modulate his voice.” A speech therapist gave him various exercises meant to help.

As Orr self-deprecatingly explains, the not unself-interested thought occurred to him that poetry might also help his father. It deals, often, with—or perhaps better in—the stress of meter, the intonations engendered by rhythm and rhyme, the pacing needed to articulate assonances and alliterations. He searched his parents’ house for leftover books from college and, “flush with inspiration,” returned to his father “armed with the fruits of English poesy.” He tells us he learned one lesson very quickly:

Do not attempt to get a stroke victum to read Hopkins. “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-/dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon . . .” I can barely pronounce this myself, and I have full use of my tongue. We did a little better with Robert Frost. (190)

Orr and his father read from Frost’s “The Silken Tent”; Orr cites the opening four lines of the poem.

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease . . .

Orr reflects on what he loves in the poem; its technical virtuosity—the entire poem is one sentence—and what he calls “the delicate exactness of the first line.” “ ‘She is as in a field a silken tent,’ rather than, for instance, ‘She is like a silken tent in a field.’ ” For Orr, following the critic Robert Pack, “ ‘the metaphor of the tent does not merely describe the ‘she’ of the poem, but rather the relationship between the speaker and the woman observed’ ” (191). (I am not at all sure that this is right.) What Orr likes about it is that Frost, in giving a relation—the metaphor itself—about a relation does something “more unusual and difficult” than poets normally attempt. (All the power in these relations, all the wealth in James’s lawn, will have to remain unanalyzed. Not by James, who can’t stop analyzing, but by Orr.)

Orr admits, though, that none of this meant anything to his father. Or perhaps better, he assumes, on the basis of what his father says to him about the poem, that its technical virtuosity meant nothing to him. For his father, the tent was interesting. It reminded him of tents pitched in open fields by traveling circuses, a sight he recalled from his own childhood. For Orr, though, the pleasure his father found in the poem wasn’t adequate. He writes, “if reminscence was all that was needed, we could just as easily have been reading a magazine article about P. T. Barnum” (192). He worries that what is properly poetic about Frost’s lines is not a part of his father’s enjoyment—the sound of the poem, its syntax, “the expert maneuvering that Frost does in order to unload the poem’s only four-syllable word in the poem’s penultimate line: ‘In the capriciousness of summer air.’ ” Orr wanted his father to hear that—and to have it “help somehow.” But help with what? Orr doesn’t tell us if the meter and rhythm of the poem made his father better able to bring intonation to his speech. That was, I thought, the point of the exercise. Given that Orr doesn’t tell us whether reciting the poem helped his father’s speech, I am going to assume that what served as the justification for the exercise was not its real agenda.

Instead of telling us about his father’s voice, Orr tells us about his father’s reminiscences. And the circus, clearly, isn’t sufficiently profound, not least because it doesn’t seem to require poetic form for its elicitation. But is the clever use of syntax and metaphor in itself valuable? Should his father be taking the same pleasure in the poem that

Orr takes, and without that specific technical pleasure, is the poem a waste of time? Does poetry require formal difficulty—in its execution and in our appreciation of that execution—in order to be worthwhile? And do we have to be able to recognize, analyze, and describe these technical achievements in order to take pleasure in them?

And then there is the question of meaning. Frost’s poem isn’t that hard to understand—arguably, its technical virtuosity is hidden by the relative simplicity of its meaning. Some readers of poetry, those who love secrets, might scoff at its lucidity. But there are secrets, and there are secrets.

Does Orr suppose his readers know the poem? That they will go look it up? (Or is he hoping that they won’t?)

Anyway, I did.

Okay, sorry, the poem.

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut,
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware. (443)

The “central cedar pole” that is the “pinnacle” of the tent, “to heavenward” “signifies the sureness of the soul,” of her soul. When no particular string pulls, the pole and its tent seem free (although Frost does not use the word), despite that—in fact because—it is “loosely bound / By countless silken ties of love and thought / To everything on earth the compass round.” The more plentiful our ties, the more sure—the more upright and capacious—the soul. But when one pulls—the speaker of the poem? a chance summer breeze?—only then is it (but of course, the tent isn’t aware, only “she” is), only then is she made aware of its/her bondage, however slight.

 There is more in Frost’s poem than might immediately catch one’s eye.

“[P]oetry,” Orr concludes, “needs a history with its readers.” For Orr, poetry, to be useful, or helpful, or whatever it is he’s seeking

needs to have been read, and thought about, and excessively praised, and excessively scorned, and quoted in melodramatic fashion, and misremembered at dinner parties. It needs, in a particular and occasionally ridiculous way, to have been loved. If poetry could do nothing for my father that a thousand other things couldn’t do, that was because it hadn’t been a part of his life—just as when I’m eventually laid low, I will take little comfort in cello concertos and origami. (192)

What Orr’s father loved and enjoyed for a few of his dying days was Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat.” (My friend loved this poem too, its divine foolishness.)

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.

Lear’s nonsense poem gave Orr’s father intense delight for a number of difficult weeks before the most difficult ones that led to his death. Orr assumes that his father must have been familiar with the poem, or one like it, and that the pleasure he took in it is tied to some dim memory of reading to his children many years before. “It was,” Orr writes, “happy silliness, soon to end—and surely there were a hundred other things that might have given my father the same comfort—but this absurd poem was, in its own small way, something.” Orr cites the closing lines of the poem and his father’s response to them:

“Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
            Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”
So they took it away, and were married next day
            By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
            They danced by the light of the moon,
                        The moon,
                        The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

“I really like,” said Dad, “the runcible spoon.” Reader, there are worse things to like. Or to love. (194)

In Infinite Jest, a novel I’ve never read, David Foster Wallace has his character, Rémy Marathe, a Québecois terrorist, say, “Choose with care. You are what you love. No?” Truth or truism, this is just the sort of literary pronouncement David Orr finds deeply embarrassing. So do I, a lot of the time; when writers proclaim that poetry and fiction can radicalize consciousness, transform the political sphere, recreate the everyday world, provide the sole and necessary grounds for ethics, usher us into an easeful death—I cringe. Poetry and fiction are marks on the page and sounds. And death, like literature, is difficult.

Who knows why Orr’s father liked Lear better than Frost, although I have a feeling it has less to do with prior knowledge of the poem than with its ability to help him articulate sound and with it, perhaps, feeling—feelings of whimsy and humor. (My sister was in a fever as she died. “Better get used to it,” someone said. We laughed and laughed. My sister, I fear, was unconscious.) Sounds elicit whole worlds of feeling. They are among the strongest—and arguably the last—of the strings that hold us to earth and enable us to reach . . . heavenward? (My sister and I sang to Daniel, snatches of half-remembered songs, as he gasped out his last, morphine-slowed breaths.) A novel by Henry James or David Foster Wallace, a poem by Robert Frost or Edward Lear, a piano concerto or a Dum Dum Girls song, it’s the saying, the listening, the reading, the repetition, the way something we love pulls us back to earth even as it lets us fly—that’s what I love.

♦♦♦

Someone close to me said that he doesn’t care what goes on at his funeral, except that he wants loud music. Really really loud.

What’s the aging hipster’s version of the Psalms?

Oh it’s a game, hold tight
Can you shut your eyes?
Shut out the light
Death is so bright

From dreams you wake to shock
To find it’s true
But she’s not you
No she’s not you

And you’d do anything to bring her back
Yes you’d do anything to bring her back

Oh I wish it wasn’t true
But there’s nothing I can do
Except hold your hand
’Til the very end
’Til the very end.
—Dum Dum Girls, “Hold Your Hand”

The words are good, but it’s the wall of sound, the layers of feedback, the echoing resonating chaos of it all, that bring the house down.

Amy Hollywood is the Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Her most recent book is Acute Melancholia and Other Essays (Columbia University Press, 2016). This essay is adapted from presentations she delivered at Duke University and Drake University in February 2015 and March 2016.