Poem of the Day: Luke Havergal

Half in love with easeful death . . .

Friedrich Heyser, Ophelia, 1900 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem is a romantic embrace of suicide — in my view, the most beautiful suicide poem in the English language. Poems Ancient and Modern could have presented the poem in any season, simply because E.A. Robinson’s 1897 work is superior verse, and the beginning of an adult critical sense is the ability to judge that something is good of its kind, even if you don’t much like the kind.

But art is in a peculiar and dangerous position these days. This week, over 17,000 artists and activists signed an open letter demanding that Israeli artists be excluded from the Venice Biennale festival in Italy, simply because they are Israelis. And even while that attempt at censorship is launched, other artists proclaim how brave they are for art on certain pet causes, violating taboos that no one has enforced for decades and everyone they know already mocks. There is no real cost to such stands.

So let’s use a harder, less self-congratulatory case of artistic freedom. On Tuesday the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit claiming that Thirteen Reasons Why, a fictional film series about the aftermath of a teen suicide, led to an actual teen’s suicide, with Netflix liable. Dismissal was the right decision, but the appeals court reached that conclusion entirely on technical grounds, deciding that papers had been filed too late and that the siblings lacked standing. And so our jurisprudence missed an opportunity to declare that art, like political opinion, must be allowed a wide range of freedom.

The excellent brief in the case filed by Eugene Volokh and his UCLA law students urged a broader decision, and much of the strong case for academic freedom that Robert P. George insisted on this week translates directly into parallels of artistic freedom. Shall we sue anyone who lectures on The Sorrows of Young Werther or Romeo and Juliet? Reads A.E. Housman’s poetry?

Nothing makes me want to glamorize suicide more than the attempt to say that it is banned as an artistic topic. We must be free to explore it, just as we must be free to reject artworks when they err. Under the Netflix plaintiffs’ theory, we would have to erase all poetry that looks at suicide. “I have been half in love with easeful Death,” as Keats once wrote. “Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” Hamlet contemplates self-slaughter in two soliloquies: “’tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep.”

Sometimes the canon of suicide poetry merely imagines the act. Langston Hughes’s “Suicide’s Note,” for example: “The calm, / Cool face of the river / Asked me for a kiss.” And sometimes the poems refuse easeful death in the name of duty and responsibility. Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” recognizes the allure of death: The snow-filled woods, “lovely, dark and deep,” call to the poet, even if in the end he turns away from the temptation of death because he has “promises to keep / And miles to go” before he sleeps.

Portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1916 (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, “Luke Havergal” from E.A. Robinson (1869–1935), takes up the particular urge for death felt in grief. In four eight-line stanzas (seven lines of pentameter with a two-foot line at the end, trailing away), and only two rhymes in each stanza, Robinson shows us a lover mourning the death of his belovèd. The lover hears a voice — “Out of a grave I come to tell you this” — that charges him to go the western gate, which is his own demise: “there is yet one way to where she is.” The beauty of the language about crimson leaves of autumn, the wind, the gate in a garden: This is the call to death, which it would be inhuman to deny ever having heard.

I demand the ability to compose art about suicide: to advocate for it, to cheer it, to write seductively of its sweet embrace. Not that I will, I suspect. I believe suicide almost always a horrifying misunderstanding — metaphysically, psychologically, and aesthetically — of the tragic beauty of the arc of human life. I can’t see clearly how I might construct a persona that says otherwise. But I still insist on the artistic freedom to do so, should I wish, on the grounds of constitutionally protected free speech. And on the grounds that artists must be able to employ irony in ways that some (or even many) readers fail to grasp on a surface reading. And, most of all, on the grounds that this newsletter proclaimed in its first installment: Art for Art’s Sake.

If a suicide poem is a good poem, then the point is that it is a good poem. We can argue, as I think I would, that art calling for the embrace of suicide is wrong at the highest and most important levels of artistic thought, and the greatest poetry is far beyond it as an account of reality. But the urge for death is a very human impulse, and art often involves the exploration of such impulses. Nothing human can be alien to poetry.

Luke Havergal

by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,
And in the twilight wait for what will come.
The leaves will whisper there of her, and some,
Like flying words, will strike you as they fall;
But go, and if you listen she will call.
Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal —
Luke Havergal.

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that’s in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering,
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies —
In eastern skies.

Out of a grave I come to tell you this,
Out of a grave I come to quench the kiss
That flames upon your forehead with a glow
That blinds you to the way that you must go.
Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,
Bitter, but one that faith may never miss.
Out of a grave I come to tell you this —
To tell you this.

There is the western gate, Luke Havergal,
There are the crimson leaves upon the wall.
Go, for the winds are tearing them away, —
Nor think to riddle the dead words they say,
Nor any more to feel them as they fall;
But go, and if you trust her she will call.
There is the western gate, Luke Havergal —
Luke Havergal.