Cancer Poetry

Iain Twiddy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137361998
• eBook ISBN: 9781137362001
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This is the first critical study to offer a sustained analysis of the theme of cancer in contemporary poetry. In discussing works by major poets, including Paul Muldoon, Jo Shapcott and Christopher Reid, Cancer Poetry traces the complex ways in which poets represent cancer, and assesses how poetry can be instrumental to emotional recovery.

1

Spousal Cancer: The Flowering of Grief

‘Lycidas’, John Milton’s pastoral elegy of 1638, first appeared in a booklet of poems commemorating Edward King, who had drowned in the Irish Sea. Towards the end of the poem, the speaker gives a list of funeral flowers and an explanation of their elegiac function. The list includes the violet, the musk rose, and ‘daffadillies’, which will ‘fill their cups with tears, / To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.’¹ ‘For so, to interpose a little ease,’ the speaker says, ‘Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.’ Milton aligns the thoughts of the mourners, and thus the words of the elegy, and thus the other elegies bound in the booklet, with the handfuls of ‘frail’ flowers depicted here.² In a similar way to laying flowers at a grave or on a coffin, arranging the words of an elegy allows, through emotional projection, an adjustment to the sudden disappearance or the longer-term dissolution of other physical and psychological forms, including grief. In its formal arrangements, and in its figures of recovery or relief, elegy is aligned with principles of change and recovery. Like the ceremonial flower arrangement, elegy is a temporary space the poet holds; both allow a framing of feeling that does not prevent passage into the wider world in which other things and feelings are regenerating.

The ceremonial, communal aspect of funerals and elegies may help to assuage primal fear, or offer the possibility of unloading emotion that is felt to be unbearable alone, but it can also support the legacy of the dead, in a species of memorial germination. For the contemporary Scottish poet Douglas Dunn, even though the experience of writing Elegies, his collection commemorating his wife Lesley Balfour Wallace, was distressing, he said it was also ‘“gratifying in the sense that I knew my wife wasn’t going to be forgotten.”’³ Consolation may consist in memorial fertility itself, or in other figures of unlocking: in alignment with natural activity, the principle described in section lv of Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H., where ‘of fifty seeds’ nature ‘often brings but one to bear’,⁴ each elegy is a seed that may bear a flower of relief, in a process which enables the mourner to return to a world less clouded by grief, to move to Milton’s ‘fresh woods, and pastures new.’⁵ However, sometimes the location of elegy, the place of beautiful forms made in tribute to the dead, can become more appealing than the world outside it, which, because it is constantly regenerating, may also be eroding the traces of the dead. Cancer elegy in particular concentrates questions over form and fertility, dissolution and regeneration. In response to the often swift destruction effected by cancer, the poet may feel a stronger need to consolidate, to remain in the spaces of elegy in order to locate more sustaining sources of consolation, or more numerous forms of memorial, or the poet may simply long for more time to adjust to life without the dead, asserting the dynamic of continuing contact as the proof of love.

The three poets featured in this chapter – Donald Hall, Christopher Reid and Douglas Dunn – have all written collections about the death of a wife from cancer, an event that threatens such a loss of selfhood that even poetic capability is compromised. All three share concerns over how elegy works, and whether their poetry is consolidating or dissipating the intensity of grief and the memory of the dead. They also engage with the question of cancer and mimesis. If the purpose of elegy is to bring grief to order, this seems particularly challenging if the origin of the poem lies in an out-of-control form. In this way, Hall, Reid and Dunn examine the extent to which mourning – that is, the process of getting over grief – is aesthetically and ethically conditioned by cancer, and the degree to which cancer can become a figure of mourning. Can time, or the passage of time indicated by metre, be conceived as a cancerous force? Or can the spread of destruction – in terms of cancer, grief, or the devastation of memory by time – be pushed back by the flowering of poetic form?

Donald Hall: Without

Donald Hall was raised in Connecticut, and studied English at Harvard and Oxford. Following the death of his grandmother, in 1975 he gave up a professorship at the University of Michigan, and moved to his grandparents’ farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire, with his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. Hall himself received two cancer diagnoses, first in 1989, and then in 1992, when it was discovered his colon cancer had metastasized to his liver.⁶ But Hall’s most devastating experience of cancer was when Jane died, in April 1995, less than 18 months after a diagnosis of leukaemia. After Jane’s death, in addition to a prose account of her life, Hall wrote two long sequences of elegies, Without (1998) and The Painted Bed (2002), which document events from her illness, and move through Hall’s utter desolation in bereavement to something only slightly more serene some years afterwards.⁷ In beginning with events before Jane dies, Without allows a more open access to the couple’s attempts to come to terms with this disease, and to the cognitive and emotional readjustments involved, than would be possible in beginning with the time of death. But in this way the sequence also inevitably sets up a narrative expectation, that it may be able to steer away from death into remission. This ambition and limitation are expressed in a figure in the first poem, ‘Her Long Illness’, in which Hall has been sitting beside Jane’s hospital bed all day. There is an urge to escape formal restriction, the cells and chemicals and equipment by which Jane is bound: together, the couple push

the IV pump

which she called Igor

slowly past the nurses’ pods, as far

as the outside door

so that she could smell the snowy air.⁸

The ‘snowy air’ is coldly ironic: the desired destination is not the full life of summer, but the non-life of winter, the absence of growth of which health consists in this situation. In a further irony, the poem expresses the frustration of passively enduring treatment, where the patient is unable to feel she is directly affecting, or coming into contact with, the snowstorm of white cells in her blood; this exposure is imagined as moving outside something Jane cannot evade. In this first poem, cancer thus unsettles a long-standing pastoral elegy convention, the progression from nature in mournful scenes of autumn or winter towards the replenishment of new life in spring. From the beginning, husband and wife are joined, in that Jane’s inability to separate from powerful chemical forms, or the inability of one set of destructive forms to combat another, is reflected in her poet husband’s ongoing inability to move beyond the restrictive forms of grief, to make the words of his poems purify the body of that sorrow and allow progress into relief.

If cancer is unsettling on these formal and emotional levels, it also unsettles the very practice of commemoration. The disjunction with pastoral elegy in ‘Her Long Illness’ runs through Without, and tracing the use of one of its most common elements, flowers, allows an appreciation of the particularly severe mourning the sequence presents. In ‘“A Beard for a Blue Pantry”’, the poet is sitting by Jane’s bed, ‘as white cells proliferate / and petechiae bloom on her skin.’⁹ Here, cancer is represented in terms of flowers in bloom, in the red spots on the skin and the invisible white cells beneath. As with the snow of the previous poem, those things that could be consoling – flowers, new life – are white flowers blooming at a funeral. Since the commemorative is already present while Jane is still alive, this suggests the rapidity of her death, and a grief so severe it has already pre-empted or collapsed the elegiac pattern of loss to regeneration. The sequence works by inversion: in conventional pastoral elegy, in brutally economic terms, one aspect of nature has been lost, but the wealth of what remains comes to offer solace; in this poem, Jane is that greater wealth, alongside which no partial consolation could be sustaining. The poetic inversion stems from the inversion of the disease. In leukaemia, immature white blood cells grow and divide in an uncontrolled way, so the ordinarily protective force is harmful; in terms of elegiac praxis, and its interaction with the psychology of grief, the poet may set the imperative of commemoration as cure, or if not as cure, then at least protection against the annihilation grief threatens. The more the poet commemorates, the more he feels he is recovering, when remaining in contact may not be the most psychologically healthy thing. Just like the white blood cells that should protect, Hall’s grief may become leukaemic, in the production of page after page of elegy.

Hall implies this lack of formal and emotional control at the end of ‘“A Beard for a Blue Pantry”’, where real things and memories leak beyond their boundaries, in remembering how Jane would wash ‘her abundant hair / which is gone now, like Bluebeard / who sickened and dwindled away.’¹⁰ Jane’s hair diminishes along with Bluebeard the cat’s fur, which melds into the black beard Hall grew when the couple were first married. The poem implies not only how cancer overrides physical parameters, the points at which cells should cease replicating, or in which parts of the body they should be, but also how it transgresses memorial and temporal boundaries; Jane’s luxurious hair, unconditionally loved in the past, becomes haunting retroactively, because its profusion seems to prefigure the growth of cancer. It is suspicious in its fertility, in the same way that in grief, cancer threatens the stability of those memories that could offer comfort: those memories are now upsetting, simply because reality will not provide more of them.

In that vulnerability, there may be thus an impossible desire to invest past moments with more emotion, with more gratitude. In ‘The Porcelain Couple’, Hall asks, as if addressing another couple, ‘Why were they not / contented’ four months earlier, when Jane had not been diagnosed with leukaemia.¹¹ This reflects a hopelessness he alluded to in a 1998 interview:

“What was the most beautiful thing in our marriage was when we weren’t aware that we were going to die. And we just had our routine. You know you look back on it, and you think, ‘Why wasn’t I aware of how blissful that was?’ But if you’d been aware of how blissful it was you would have been dreading losing it. Anybody who’s been through anything like this knows what I mean.”¹²

Hall is also aware, in turn, that if there had been more joy, or more awareness of joy, the present devastation would be even more acute. Hall’s intense mourning feels for him like the assertion of love: his grief involves the idealization of the loved one – in the illusory hope that it can prevent the death – and so it diffuses obsessive, empty questions like this one, threatening to destroy the sufficiency of a memory, and demanding that something should have been what it was not, and did not need to be.¹³

As these grievous poems spread, they are increasingly regressive. In considering cancer, Hall thinks of when the couple courted, describes Jane’s physical beauty, particularly her hair, and in ‘The Porcelain Couple’, articulates a childlike sense of justice:

Inside him,

some four-year-old

understood that if he was good — thoughtful,

considerate, beyond

reproach, perfect — she would not leave him.¹⁴

Hall attempts to modify the physical into the metaphysical, to reduce chemical certainties to the plea of love, to rein in cancer’s expansiveness. But love and romance are no longer a defence: in the long poem ‘Air Shatters in the Car’s Small Room’, Hall describes how when the couple lay together for the last time, ‘making the spoons’, they ‘clattered / with a sound like the end man’s bones’;¹⁵ when Jane has a bone marrow transplant, as well as a number of total body irradiation sessions, he enters her room, an ‘antibiotic / cube’, wearing special garments: ‘Jane said he looked like a huge condom.’¹⁶ Here the impulse to recovery or fertility is blocked, and throughout Without, Hall balances growth with restriction, exploring the bind of creati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Cancer Poetry: An Introduction
• 1 Spousal Cancer: The Flowering of Grief
• 2 Parental Cancer: The Functions of Repression
• 3 Locating Breast Cancer
• 4 Surviving Cancer
• 5 Terminal Words: Conversing with Cancer
• 6 Paul Muldoon: Cancer and the Ethics of Representation
• 7 Fierce Verse: Cancer and Imaginative Redress
• 8 Remission
• Notes and References
• Bibliography
• Index