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Language, Loss, and “the things that lead to life”
Sara Atwood
During the past two academic terms, my students and I have spent a good deal of time reading, discussing, and writing about grief. I’ve created a syllabus for my introductory writing class centered on Helen Macdonald’s memoir, H is for Hawk, the story of a bereaved daughter’s effort to train a goshawk in the wake of her father’s sudden death. Another narrative thread in this rich and multilayered book 
explores the life of T.H. White and his conflicted relationship with Gos, the bird at the center of his 1951 book The Goshawk. Other strands include nature, memory, and language. In addition to Hawk, I include readings that speak to the book’s themes: poetry (Dickinson, Tennyson, Arnold, Mary Oliver, Howard Nemerov, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin and others); memoir (including excerpts from work by Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, Hilary Mantel, and Penelope Lively); essays (Thoreau, Ruskin, Muir, Stegner, Annie Dillard, Robert Macfarlane); and short stories (Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Woolf).
The first time I taught this syllabus, I wondered whether my students might find it too “heavy”. Given the high incidence of anxiety and depression on college campuses, was I taking a risk in asking these young people to focus largely on grief and loss for ten weeks? On the other hand, I don’t believe in teaching anodyne classes in order to avoid discomfort or dissent; grief and loss are an inevitable part of life. I also felt that the works I’d included would ultimately have as much, if not more, to say about life as they do about death. Media vita in morte sumus, after all, and it is this awareness that gives life its urgency and beauty. “One is apt to forget all about life,” Virginia Woolf remarks in “The Death of the Moth,” “seeing it humped and bossed and garnished and cumbered”.[1] Yet the moth’s death points up for Woolf the strangeness of life, how improbable it is that we should be here at all. Tennyson’s great poem of loss, “In Memoriam,” though occasioned by the death of Arthur Hallam, is nonetheless vibrantly, often wrenchingly, alive. A study of the deeply vital struggles of one man’s soul, the poem speaks to the universal human experience of grief, love, doubt, and faith. Though the poem was born of loss, it is about how to live. When Emily Dickinson writes about death or depression, it is her fierce energy that fascinates; she conveys grief so vividly because she is feverishly, dynamically alive. And although Helen Macdonald’s goshawk Mabel—“thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket”[2]—is driven by the instinct to kill, it is her vitality that helps heal Macdonald’s sorrow. There is no loss without life; we cannot talk, or write, about one without the other. Ultimately, all the works on my syllabus point to the truth of Ruskin’s maxim that “THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.” This truth has underscored our classroom discussions, even when—perhaps especially when—actual grief intruded, for some of us, upon its literary expression.
Over the course of three terms spent teaching versions of this syllabus, my students and I experienced significant personal loss—of loved ones, health, relationships, homes, and what we had thought of, naively, as certainties. Yet the works we read never intensified despair. This is not simply because we could “relate” to them—one can relate to a text or a tweet. Rather it has to do with craftsmanship and art. Ruskin’s reflection on Gothic architecture applies equally to language: “It is not enough that it has the Form, if it have not also the power and the life”.[3] The language of these works about death and grief is alive, and it communicates something of that life to us. It is valuable in the Ruskinian sense of life-enhancing. “To be ‘valuable, therefore,” Ruskin writes in Unto This Last, “is to ‘avail towards life.’ A truly valuable or availing thing is that which leads to life with its whole strength”.[4]
Consider, for instance, the bittersweet, poignant beauty of W.S. Merwin’s “Rain Light”:
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning
The first four lines (lines I can’t read without a catch in my throat) describe a quiet loss, or letting go. Subsequent lines evoke the deep time that transcends human existence and the turbulence of the present moment. Yet the poem is about connection rather than separation, endurance rather than despair. The speaker’s mother, in departing, points to the continuity of time and nature, to a fundamental, elegant balance in which rain, cloud, and flowers are inextricably linked and interdependent, their persistence simultaneously mundane and miraculous: “see how they wake without a question/ even though the whole world is burning.” Merwin’s language isn’t complex or ornate; it’s the very simplicity and familiarity of the concrete nouns—stars, house, rain, flowers, water, cloud, sun—that draw us into the poem and carry us beyond the concrete and knowable to the abstract ideas at the poem’s heart. It’s all beautifully, economically done—the poem has not only the form, but the power and the life.
Although we didn’t know it, the winter term was moving inexorably towards a kind of unprecedented grief as the coronavirus pandemic gathered speed and intensity, fracturing the familiar world and demanding rapid adaptation to a frightening new reality. The final week of classes and exams were disrupted, instructors scrambling to make alternative arrangements, and the spring term will be conducted entirely online. Now communities across the world are on lockdown, trying to halt the spread of the virus through social distancing and quarantine. The news is relentlessly grim, with no clear end in sight. Yet in a culture routinely criticized for its solipsism and technology-driven isolation, what we miss the most turns out to be human connection. We want to sit and talk with our friends in a restaurant or pub, hike and shop together, attend classes full of real people in real classrooms, ride the crowded subway, stroll through a gallery, even sit through meetings in the same room as our colleagues. Although commentators (including myself) have decried our phones as agents of social dislocation, it turns out that we are far less dislocated than we had thought. In the present crisis, we are happy to use the technology that draws us together and approximates in-person interaction, but we spend most of our time on it longing for actual togetherness. Despite our divisive politics and soul-crushing economics, and although it feels as though we are living in the shadow of Ruskin’s plague-cloud (“Blanched Sun,—blighted grass,—blinded man”[5]), it appears that deep down we agree with Ruskin that “The highest and first law of the universe – and the other name of life is, therefore, ‘help.’ The other name of death is ‘separation’”.[6] What’s more, the pandemic requires that we live this law, acting not only in our own best interest, but in the interest of others; recognizing and protecting our interdependence and community.
Unsurprisingly, we are also turning hopefully toward “the things that lead to life,” literature prominent among them. This is not simply about escapism, although there is surely an element of it involved: witness the many lists of ‘contagion literature’ and frequent references to The Decameron, Journal of the Plague Year, The Plague, and Station Eleven, to name only a few. Like the works on my syllabus, the darkness of these books throws the mystery of life into relief. The hunger we have right now for language and story is a desire for insight into this mystery, conveyed by writers of vision in language both technically and imaginatively brilliant, language that startles and moves us. Confronting as we are a malign, invisible force, Tennyson’s indifferent, scornful Nature—“I care for nothing, all shall go”[7]—seems frighteningly real, just as his bewildered questioning expresses our own sometimes faltering faith. In the present “Hour of Lead”[8] we feel, with Dickinson, the Soul’s bandaged moments and struggle to nurture the thing with feathers. We hope, with Macdonald, that “perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world [is] an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if [we] cannot see them”.[9]
As I have said elsewhere, language binds us to the world in profound and lasting ways; we cannot touch words, nor do we make them with our hands, yet we use them to give shape and form to reality. Words will not stop the unfolding disaster, but words matter. They are the material from which we build our world—and, in times like these, reconstruct and sustain it.
Sara Atwood’s work has appeared in The Ruskin Review and Bulletin, Nineteenth-Century Prose, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and Carlyle Studies Annual. Her book, Ruskin’s Educational Ideals, was published by Ashgate in 2011. She is a contributor to the Yale University Press edition of Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (2013), Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century(Palgrave 2017), John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education (Anthem Press 2018), and William Morris and John Ruskin: A New Road on Which the World Should Travel (University of Exeter Press 2019). She has lectured widely on Ruskin, both in the US and abroad. Sara is an adjunct lecturer in English literature and writing at Portland State University and Portland Community College.
[1] Virginia Woolf, “The Death of the Moth,” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: The Hogarth Press, 1945. 10.
[2] Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk, London: Jonathan Cape, 2014. 189.
[3] Works, 10.183.
[4] Works, 17.84-5.
[5] Works, 34.40.
[6] Works, 7.207.
[7] Alfred Tennyson, “In Memoriam,” New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973. 56.4.
[8] The phrase is from Dickinson’s poem “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” Other references in this sentence are to Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged moments” and “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”
[9] Macdonald, 151.