Honest Death

The crippling concept of being trapped in a moment of horror, perpetual mourning.  As Walt so eloquently states in When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d, “I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring” or in other words the mourning shall not end when the moment of crises has passed.  Traumatic moments are often less traumatizing than the memories of those moments, because memories fade when we wish they wouldn’t, and persist when we wish they’d cease to exist.  Whitman seems to be acknowledging that we live in a world in constant flux where death is the only constant, and therefore he almost pities death as the “sad orb” whose diffidence he accepts as well as its definitive terror.

One should confidently be able to say that Whitman’s poem is all encompassing and could easily suffice for the suffering portrayed in the 9/11 poems.  What gives Walt’s a universal quality that the others do not necessarily possess, is the ambiguity that troubles the reader when the poem ends.  In the 9/11 poems one can fairly easily pinpoint the focal point or theme being presented, whereas in Whitman’s poem we get no concrete sense of what he’s talking about other than the fact that he is troubled by the haunting presence of death and its many complications.  However, this is not to say that one poem is more or less effective than the other when attempting to grapple with situations that we may be emotionally incapable of grasping.  One poem in particular that struck me as possessing some qualities of Walt, was “Hum” by Ann Lauterbach.  Structurally speaking the poem is nothing like that of Walt’s, but in content it embodies the notion of combing both the beautiful with the bitter, and embraces death in the way that Walt walks with the thought and knowledge of death’s sadly beautiful existence.