Arlo, my three-year-old son, picked the miniature book from the shelf, I imagine, because it scaled him to an adult size. He didn’t know that it was a collection of poetry by young men who were killed in the First World War. He brought it to the dinner table and issued his most effective command, “Read it!”
I did as I was told, though not without the feeling that I ought to skip any mention of the words “dead” or “die” or “kill.” Are they safe? Or do they plant awful thoughts? But I had already transgressed that taboo when I told him very plainly that Appo, his grandfather, had died in December, not “passed away” or “gone away.” His mother and I did not want to give the impression that Appo had voluntarily left for some place, abandoning us—“away” has a very literal meaning for Arlo. (“No take away my lunch!”) Not that he accepted what I told him; he argued with me about it, telling me that Appo will come back “one day soon.” The Last Judgement loomed—how could I not think of that? It’s those little things that gnaw at your mind when it is most fragile.
So I didn’t skip any of the words in the poems. But I scanned the tiny volume for one that was least likely to be completely depressing.
I read the famous one by John McCrae about foreign fields in Flanders and poppies. McCrae was a Canadian from Guelph, Ontario, and there was symmetry in Arlo hearing it because Laura and I had taken a short trip there a few months before he was born. We had to buy some baby things from Ikea and the closest one is in Canada. Guelph was somewhere we hadn’t been before. In the center of the town, there is a hill with an Anglican church on it. McCrae’s statue stands in front it, surrounded by lines from the iconic poem.
War poems are sad. I only knew about the War Poets from living in the UK, where I taught secondary school. They are Required Reading there. Not in the US. They convey the brutality of war, of course, but somehow they also evoke British patriotism, maybe because you know most of the poets died in battle as you read them. My sense is that they are less about the idiocy of war in general than that of World War One specifically. I’ve never cried reading them, though the whole thing is full of despair.
The next day, Arlo asked me to read from the little book again. I have ways of resisting his requests by playing stupid and I instead grabbed a poem-of-the-day book we have. The poem for April 14 was “O Captain! My Captain!” More death and romantic patriotism, and I don’t like Whitman very much. On the opposite page, for the next day, was “Dover Beach,” a poem that Laura especially loves.
I read it to Arlo while he ate a grilled cheese sandwich, apple slices (I refuse to take off the skins that he doesn’t eat), and frozen peas (an anomaly of a treat, it turns out). But, by the last stanza, I started to sob uncontrollably.
Ah, love, let us be true
“Dover Beach” – Matthew Arnold (1867)
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Crying for me has always felt like a loss of control. When a movie or a passage from a book makes me cry, I remember the moment for years afterward. Its impression remains distinct, fermenting in some quiet place in mind, becoming its own agent. I don’t remember it; I could never call upon it at will. But something happens and the moment remembers me.
On seeing the Jeremy Irons version of Lolita in the cinema in 1998: Early spring day. Sunlight suspended in a way by the heavy pollen in the air. I’m on Thayer Street in Providence. A low-register smell of cumin from the Indian restaurant across the street expands the fragrance of blossoms. After the film, I leave the theater and turn around to look at the marquis one last time, comparing the new feeling of sadness I had with the doldrum naivety I had just a few hours before. It was a conversion experience, and I became obsessed with Nabokov for a long time. I wanted to know why that story affected me so much. I know that the 1999 adaptation of Lolita is bad. But I didn’t think so at the time and, even if I had, it made me cry. Pretending that never happened would be dishonest, a betrayal of my own history, even if it exposes a ridiculous affectation.
When we cry or laugh, we are exposed to the world, vulnerable to others, even when they’re dead. Arnold, long in his grave, made me cry because his words evoked something true about how I felt when I read it to Arlo that evening (COVID-19 replicating merrily somewhere, an ignorant army marching behind it). Tears are not all there is to crying—the face muscles tighten, I look off away somewhere, small convulsions in waves from my gut to my neck, my tongue presses up against the roof of my mouth as though to push the saddening thought away. As my body quakes, so does my mind. This is how crying is physically vulgar.
Crying is vulgar in another way, too. The image of crying sparks resentment among some people. A persuasive trick when rational discourse fails.
Arnold was alive when he wrote “Dover Beach.” Energy moved his hand to write the poem. Matter—ink, paper—is transformed. Some 150 years later, I read it and cry. It is hard to ignore it as a human effort reaching me, which is why I have always struggled with the Death of the Author concept.
Crying casts a shadow over all else once it has passed. It’s a mild sedative that does help improve things for a bit. Recovery of a small disaster for the sense of control it lends, a storm that’s passed. A moment we will forget but be changed by forever. I don’t remember the circumstances, but I remember very deeply crying as a child. In my room, punished for something or other. Not getting what I want. A death.
Why does a stanza from a poem make me cry, but the news of thousands of people dying doesn’t? I feel many things—anxiety, concern, worry for friends and family, anger towards others—but I don’t cry.