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Mortality and Contemporary Literature*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2011

Amos N. Wilder
Amos N. Wilder
Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School
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Extract

If we speak here of contemporary literature, let us nevertheless recall that in all ages men have recorded certain common responses to death and mortality that vary little. The universal themes of dread and stupor, of grief and compunction, of transience and corruptibility — such poignancies of our finite condition underlie whatever special cultural or even religious influences come into play, or whatever particular hopes are projected. It is for this reason that elegies for fallen heroes and laments for toppled cities and broken hopes, in Job or Homer, are still moving, or the heartbreak in a papyrus letter, or the plangent grief of Catullus as he comes across many seas to his brother's grave,

ut te postremo donarem munere mortis

et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem.

Indeed, we must say that it is only in total openness to such common experience of grief and trepidation that other more positive overtones of death can make themselves felt and justify themselves.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , January 1965 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1965

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References

1 “Whitsunday in Kirchstetten,” The Listener 70, no. 1806 (Nov. 7, 1963), 731.

2 Carmen 101.

3 Cited from the volume by Kennedy, Charles W., Old English Elegies: Translated into Alliterative Verse with a Critical Introduction (Princeton University Press, 1936), pp. 45–51.Google Scholar The MS is from the tenth century, but the poem can be dated between A.D. 700 and 725. I wish to record my thanks to the Rev. John P. Mclntyre, S.J., of Weston College for bringing the poem to my attention. In doing so Father Mclntyre observed: “We have here pretty much the reverse of the modern sense of personal alienation. If, in a real sense, the modern man ‘wants to be alone,’ the Old English society cursed the unattached man — he threatened the clan or family as a stranger.”

4 As a New Testament teacher I was challenged recently to explain the fact that in the New Testament as a whole one finds no considerable passage or passages which a mourner can make his own for the expression and relief of personal sorrow. My answer was that the Christian Bible of course includes and demands Job and the Psalms and other records eloquent of the generic human passions.

5 Paris: Collection Merlin (The Olympia Press [1953]).

6 P. 21.

7 “Prometheus,” Collected Poems, 1921–1958 (London: Faber, 1960), p. 215.Google Scholar

8 Collected Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 99.Google Scholar Theodore Roethke has a similar figure in “The Dying Man: in Memoriam W.B. Yeats”:

The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
Words for the Wind (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), p. 181.

9 New York: Harper, 1928.

10 P. 34.

11 A Dream of Governors (WesleyanUniversity Press [1959])Google Scholar, p. 15.

12 The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, n.d.).

13 P. 143.

14 p. 146.

15 Mörchen, Hermann, Rilkes Sonette an Orpheus (Stuttgart, 1958), p. 91.Google Scholar

16 The Disenchanted Mind (Meridian Books, 1959), p. 277.

17 Transport to Summer (New York: Knopf, 1947).Google Scholar

18 P. 47

19 P. 53.

20 London: Faber, 1957.

21 Pp. 31–32.

22 See f.n. 1.

23 Op. cit. f.n. 12, p. 110.

24 Interview, cited by Marvin Halverson.

25 New York: Knopf, 1947.

26 Pp. 350–52.

27 Sequence Sometimes Metaphysical (Iowa City: The Stonewall Press, 1963), no pagination.

28 Personal letter. See his article, “The Case Against God in Contemporary French Drama,” Religion in Life (Autumn, 1962).Google ScholarPubMed

29 En attendant Godot (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1952), pp. 134–35.Google ScholarPubMed

30 Krapp's Last Tape and Embers (London: Faber, 1959), pp. 15–16.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., p. 23.