There’s a Time When Only Poetry Will Do

More than a month--the biblically appointed time for public grieving--has passed since the deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette. Is there anything more to be said? Nothing more, perhaps, in prose, but something might be said now and could have been said sooner in poetry.

A nation cannot mourn in chat. The language resources that serve politicians and political commentators well in moments of political or economic crisis fail them when the subject is an accidental death without political or economic consequences. Even personal acquaintance with the deceased is no guarantee of eloquence, for when no power or money is at stake, the ultimate subject becomes inescapable. That subject is not who he was or who she was but who we all are. We are mortal, in a word, and to speak of that, only poets have remotely adequate language.

Robert Frost, who recited his poem “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, also wrote:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower,

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

“Nothing Gold Can Stay,” the title of Frost’s poem as well as its last line, comes closer to expressing what the nation felt when Kennedy, his wife and sister-in-law were killed July 16 than anything extemporized on the occasion by any anchorperson, however dignified, however conventionally well-spoken. Frost was not writing about these young dead, but just that distance permits his words to lift the particular into the general and unite the many in a common sentiment. Can a more accomplished poem be named? No doubt. My point is only that in traumatic moments, we need somehow to escape the swamp of quotidian prose.

In American public life, I have rarely heard poetry used to greater effect than it was on Good Friday, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy, having learned of Martin Luther King’s assassination, addressed a largely black audience from the bed of a truck. Kennedy was in Indianapolis campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. Speaking without notes, he said:

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust, at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say I feel in my heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, and he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’ ”

The personal reference, at that dark hour, cut deep, but Aeschylus cut deeper still.

The memorial that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis chose to create for her first husband was not a mausoleum but a commissioned work of music and poetry, a Mass by Leonard Bernstein with Stephen Schwartz. The emotional and liturgical climax of this work comes at the moment of symbolic death, the “fraction” or breaking of the bread, when the celebrant says:

I suddenly feel every step I’ve ever taken,

And my legs are lead.

And I suddenly see every hand I’ve ever shaken,

And my arms are dead.

I feel every psalm that I’ve ever sung

Turn to wormwood on my tongue.

And I wonder,

Oh, I wonder,

Was I ever really young?

When someone you love dies, that’s what you feel: so old, suddenly, that you wonder if you were ever young. The leitmotif of this Mass is the plaintive (rather than elegiac) cry “How easily things get broken!”--words that fit John Kennedy Jr. even better than they fit his father.

There is no shame in borrowing eloquence. In a time of agony, the ordinary words of ordinary good people are rarely quite enough. Then, if ever, we need the best from the best. We need poetry.