He Held Radical Light by Christian Wiman

Author:Christian Wiman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

AUBADE

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

—The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

I’m guessing there are at least a few readers out there who have never read this Larkin poem before, and I’m guessing they just got some serious ice in their spines. I’ve read “Aubade” for thirty years, and it still gives me ice in my spine. I would be worried if it didn’t. I once heard a preacher say of this poem, with a breath of relief, that this is exactly how he would feel if he weren’t a Christian, which seems to me exactly wrong. I don’t think it’s possible for believers to stand outside of the most powerful achievements of secular art and say “if only that artist could see what we can see,” as if their visions were greater than what the artist achieved in the work of art. No, if we have seen properly, then the identification has been too deep: we have participated in the revelation, however dark it has been. That’s not to say that some art isn’t harmful or even demonic. Kafka’s concern about the provenance of his inspiration was unnecessary in his case, I think, but not absurd.

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