“And wish the dead, as happier than ourselves
And higher, having climb’d one step beyond
Our village miseries, might be borne in white
To burial or to burning, hymned from hence
With songs in praise of death, and crowned with flowers.”
No doubt Tennyson was to a very great extent able to stay himself on the personal mystic experiences described in his poem The Ancient Sage—experiences which gave him a subjective assurance that death was “a ludicrous impossibility”. Browning, characteristically buoyant, was ready to face death with a laugh; the fog in the throat will pass, the black minute’s at end, then thy breast. In Prospice we feel the eager sureness with which he looked forward to rejoining her whose bodily presence had left him a few months before. But even Browning’s cheery salutation is outdone by Whitman. The American, though acquainted with suffering as Browning was not, and though apparently without much belief or interest in personal survival, was almost uncannily friendly to his own taking off. And it was not because he suffered so greatly that he hailed release. It was more the natural outcome of his joyous temperament, subdued at the last to a kind of solemn exaltation. The following stanzas were written with George Inness’ picture The Valley of the Shadow of Death in mind:
“Nay, do not dream, designer dark,
Thou hast portray’d or hit thy theme entire;
I, hoverer of late by this dark valley, by its confines, having glimpses of it,
Here enter lists with thee, claiming my right to make a symbol too.
For I have seen many wounded soldiers die,
After dread suffering—have seen their lives pass off with smiles,
And I have watch’d the death-hours of the old; and seen the infant die;
The rich, with all his nurses and his doctors;
And then the poor, in meagreness and poverty;
And I myself for long, O Death, have breath’d my every breath
Amid the nearness and the silent thought of thee.
“And out of these and thee,
I make a scene, a song (not fear of thee,
Nor gloom’s ravines, nor bleak, nor dark—for I do not fear thee,
Nor celebrate the struggle, or contortion, or hard-tied knot),
Of the broad blessed light, and perfect air, with meadows, rippling tides, and trees and flowers and grass,
And the low hum of living breeze—and in the midst God’s beautiful eternal right hand,
Thee, holiest minister of Heaven—thee, envoy, usherer, guide at last of all,
Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot called life,
Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death.”
This is indeed a change from the idea of Death as King of Terrors, as “spectre feared of man”. (In Memoriam)
The Greek idea, at its best, seems to have been half-way between the two extremes. It regarded death with more or less equanimity, as being certainly not the greatest evil—no king of terrors—but merely an emissary of greater Powers, to whose will we must bow, though with dignity:
“He that is a man in good earnest must not be so mean as to whine for life, and grasp intemperately at old age; let him leave this point to Providence.”—(Plato: Gorgias)
Sophocles has the same thought, with an added touch of Hamlet-like irritation about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune:
“It is a shame to crave long life, when troubles
Allow a man no respite. What delight
Bring days, one with another, setting us
Forward or backward on our path to death?
I would not take the fellow at a gift
Who warms himself with unsubstantial hopes;
But bravely to live on, or bravely end,
Is due to gentle breeding. I have said.”—(Ajax)
Cicero voices the same pagan feeling, in the contented language of a rather tired, wise old man: