A time to mourn, says the Preacher. It is one of the basic human (and probably not only human) purposes under heaven. Grief's representation and enactment have been primary functions of poetry since the beginning, where it levels heroes and kings. Achilles, grieving for Patroclus, desecrates Hector's corpse; Priam, grieving for Hector, places himself at Achilles' mercy to recover the body. Gilgamesh, grieving for Enkidu,

… covered, like a bride, the face of his friend,
like an eagle he circled around him.
Like a lioness deprived of her cubs,
he paced to and fro, this way and that.
[tr. Andrew George]

But mourning is twofold:

For his friend Enkidu Gilgamesh
did bitterly weep as he wandered the wild:
"I shall die, and shall I not then be as Enkidu?
Sorrow has entered my heart!"

When we turn to poetry in our grief, whether as reader or composer, well—it's also Mar garet we mourn for.

George Puttenham, in The Art of English Poesy, discerns yet another facet of "poetical lamentation":

Lamenting is altogether contrary to rejoicing: every man saith so, and yet it is a piece of joy to be able to lament with ease and freely to pour forth a man's inward sorrows and the griefs wherewith his mind is surcharged. This was a very necessary device of the poet and a fine: besides his poetry to play also the physician, and not only by applying a medicine to the ordinary sickness of mankind, but by making the very grief itself (in part) cure of the disease.

The poem transmutes the grief, in part, into cure. The making of the poem, and the reading of it, effect the work of mourning, which for Freud was to enable the abandonment of the lost object and an identification with a new one—in this case, the poem itself. As Susan Howe puts it in "The Disappearance Approach," a poem on the loss of her husband: "Sorrows have been passed and unknown continents approached."

A selection from Howe's poem appears in Jeffrey Yang's idiosyncratic anthology Time of Grief: Mourning Poems, a handsome pocketbook from New Directions. The book, Yang writes, "is divided into forty-nine days, or stations, of grief," recalling the 49-day periods of both the Buddhist calendar of mourning and the Jewish Counting of the Omer. Like most poetry anthologies, this one ranges from the sublime to the mediocre, but by following an internal logic that skips across centuries and styles, it develops a lively rhythm that prevents its weighty subject matter from oppressing the reader.

The second entry ("Day 2") is Tomas Tranströmer's "After Someone's Death." The first line reduces the initial experience of grief to its essential trauma—"Once there was a shock"—while the second finds an objective correlative for its wake: "that left behind a long pale glimmering comet's tail." And the poet reveals the flipside of Gilgamesh's self-mourning: he is still alive. "You can still shuffle along on skis in the winter sun / among groves where last year's leaves still hang."

This note, predictably and rightly, resounds throughout the poems Yang has gathered. The Romanian-born Israeli poet Yoel Hoffmann: "There is no end to it (she thinks), and nevertheless here I am walking around under the sun." Muriel Rukeyser: "now I begin again the private rising, / the ride to survival." The Dutch poet Hans Faverey: "I'm standing straight among rising plants." Mallarmé: "as long as we / go on living, he / lives—in us."

Yang has arranged his bouquet with care. Mallarmé's poem "A Tomb for Anatole" (Day 18) ends with a brief section beginning "know that he is no longer / here." Denise Levertov's "At David's Grave" (Day 19) begins: "Yes, he is here in this / open field, in sunlight." The next poem, Johannes Bobrowski's "Silcher's Grave"—"No question / more to be heard, none answered"—is followed by Stevie Smith's "Grave by a Holm-Oak": "Ask not, cries the holm-oak, / Weep, says snow." And so on, poem answering and elaborating on poem, existing within a world of other poems.

This is more than a simple, albeit skillful, creation of thematic resonance. The threads that lead from poem to poem mimic what I hate to call "the grieving process"—the slow rediscovery of connections, tethers holding the mourner here, on earth, in life. Among other things, the book is one long deployment of vegetable images: sun, wheat, trees, bread, rose, water, sky, smoke, heather, flower, willow, stone, chestnut.

Of course there are longueurs. It seems cruel to subject a reader already in mourning to the period trifles of Lawrence Ferlinghetti ("We are alive and breathing!") and Nathaniel Tarn ("hot blood spurting out crimson"). And, presumably because New Directions owns the rights, we are given Kenneth Rexroth's plodding renditions of several Chinese and Japanese poems, and J. B. Leishman's translation of Rilke's "Requiem for a Friend" into English as a second language:

All we can offer where we love is this:
to loose each other; for to hold each other
comes easy to us and requires no learning.

Could anyone prefer this to Stephen Mitchell's version?

We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

Any anthology is an excuse to imagine your own improved edition. If I were selecting poems of mourning (and didn't have to worry about obtaining permissions), I'd surely include James Schuyler's elegy for Frank O'Hara, "Buried at Springs," with its subtly poignant opening:

There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much.

One of us will have to go, indeed. And then the other will. But not yet. I think too of Donald Hall's wrenching elegies for Jane Kenyon (whose excellence taught me to question the received wisdom of my peers)—"Your peonies lean their vast heads westward / as if they might topple. Some topple"—and of poems by Donne and Dickinson, Frederick Seidel and Susan Wheeler.

But here are Bernadette Mayer and George Herbert, Du Fu and Michael Palmer, H. D. and Leopardi, and our great poet of anti-consolation, Allen Grossman. And rounding out the collection is Zhuangzi, whose friend, visiting him after his wife's death, finds him singing and beating on a washtub, and asks why he is not grieving (it's worth comparing Zhuangzi's attitude here with that of Confucius in book eleven of the Analects). Zhuangzi responds that of course he grieved at first. But then he reflected that there had been a time before his wife was born. Then "within an inchoate confusion there took place a transformation and there was vital spirit":

The vital spirit was transformed and there came forth form, and with the transformation of form there was life. Now once again there is a transformation and she has died. What happened may be compared to the progression of the four seasons—spring, summer, autumn, winter. Now she is lying at peace in a large room. For me to follow after her weeping and wailing would be an indication that I have no thorough understanding of human destiny. So I stopped grieving.
[tr. D. H. Smith]

This is, I think, at least in part, the cure that Puttenham refers to. To read a poem is al ways to be reminded that our individual experience is not truly individual, and it is perhaps in grief that we most need to remember this. George Oppen revises Eliot: "till other voices wake / us or we drown."

We must wake to communality—to song—or drown in the self. A time to mourn, but also a time to dance. A time to pound on a tub and sing.

Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collection Alien vs. Predator (Penguin) and a book of criticism, Equipment for Living, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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