Arts and Letters

When a man dies in old age after a full, productive life it is natural to think of his death as his life's right end. But with John Hall Wheelock there can be no such comfortable assumption. He died last winter at the age of ninety-one, having put together in his last few months a book of poems, thirteen of them new. No reader of those poems will believe they make an end. They are as clearly a beginning as though they had been written by a man of twenty, in his first, fresh mastery of the art. Or by Thomas Hardy toward the end when he had found his way. For there have been late beginnings before this. "Men improve with the years," says Yeats with his tongue in his cheek. But for Wheelock, as for Yeats himself, it was not so much a matter of improvement as of a kind of becoming—as though he had suddenly, and at a moment when he had almost ceased to be, become entirely and amazingly himself.

Rilke, in his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, speaks of such an experience but in terms of a young man's notion of it. Brigge is in his twenties when he writes: "Ah, but verses amount to so little when one begins to write them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end one might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings. (We have them soon enough.) They are experiences." But whatever Brigge may have thought, Rilke did not himself wait a whole life long and I can think of no one else who ever did. Sense and sweetness do not come from waiting. They come from working. And Rilke knew it as Wheelock knew it, who published his first book when he was younger than Brigge, and went on publishing one after another for almost seventy years, and then found sense enough and sweetness not only for "ten good lines" but for a blaze of work into which he disappeared like a horseman into the rising of the sun.

It is difficult, as you see, to write plainly of these things. Comparisons are implied between the work of one period and the work of another, and in poetry, of course, there are no comparisons. A poet is a man who has written a poem—perhaps several poems—conceivably as many as Li Po—but in any case a poem. And a poem is a unique and incomparable and ultimate event unlike any other. Which means that the question is not whether that fragment of Sappho's which begins "The moon is down and the Pleiades" is a "better" poem than the Odyssey. The question is whether it is a poem. And this is true always and everywhere—with these last poems of Wheelock's as with all the rest. The recognition of a poem as a poem—as a unique and incomparable event—is the measure of the art. And it is the challenge of that recognition we must face, difficult as it is, if we would talk about a poet's life… and death.

Wheelock had all this in mind and said so, almost in so many words, when he put this last book of his together. The theme of its first poem is that intimate converse across the frontiers between the living and the dead which poetry makes possible—a communication far more intimate than any among the living. And its title is To You, Perhaps Yet Unborn.

It is night and we are alone together, your head
Bends over the open book, your feeding eyes devour
The substance of my dream.
Oh, sacred hour
That makes us one—you fleeting and I already fled.

The almost unimaginable image of those last six words makes sayable what cannot be said and we change the words a little to take them as our own: "we fleeting and you already fled"—the you being Keats or Rimbaud or even Shakespeare if we dare—whatever voice across the evanescence is nearest to us. And of these voices Wheelock's is now one.

But there is another of these poems—the second of them—in which this sense of becoming—this sense of the poem—is made even more explicit.

It is called Self-Counsel In Age but it says far more than that.

Though much is lost strange victory has been won.
Exult, my heart, put hope and fear away;
Sing for your own delight though there be none
To hear you out, sing on while yet you may;
Give thanks for all glad hours beneath the sun;
For peace and eventual liberation pray,
Now the high lonely stars of night come on.

What is the catch of breath as we read that final line? Is it not the recognition of the presence of the poem? And, after that, the realization of the man?

It took courage to write those words—the difficult courage of Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night"—the courage to love life fiercely and passionately even as life becomes unlivable. But it demanded also something more—the confidence, the assurance, which only the ultimate realization of the self can give. Wheelock had found it at his life's end. He had become so truly himself that he could accept all the chances, all the risks, and make a poem of his dying.

I have said nothing of his life because it is all there in his life's end. And yet something must be said even so. It was a long and a successful life lived almost altogether in this city and in the island which reaches seaward from it. He had many friends who loved him. He had the rare good fortune to be truly married. His work occupied him. He had everything a writer needs. He was read by many and with admiration.

But even when all this is said it remains true that the meaning of his life was in his work and that the meaning of his work was in its end: the victory, the exultation at the heart, now the high lonely stars of night come on.