Last time I said I’d return to Keats and ‘glut[ting] thy sorrow on a morning rose‘, but I’ve got a bit distracted by a Frost poem. Maybe it’s not distraction, though. Perhaps I haven’t had enough coffee yet to remember why the poem joined up—in my head at least—with the Keats and, according to my notes, Frankenstein and the recent film Freud’s Last Session (!). Blimey. Perhaps best just read it before I say any more. Here’s ‘Acceptance‘ by Robert Frost.
I appreciate the quietly disturbing nature of ‘Acceptance’, the way it does that sonnet-y thing of starting in one place and, in a modest fourteen lines, ending up somewhere quite different. At first you think it’s going to be a statement about how fear/grief/sorrow are the product of consciousness by which ‘no voice in nature’ is burdened—because ‘wild things…/ do not tax their lives with forethought/ of grief’. But while Wendell appreciates the peace of wild things, Robert is busy projecting human consciousness onto them,* so that by the poem’s end we find that such acceptance as the bird achieves is for one night only, or night by night; and is merely a function of necessity, an alternative to paralysis by apprehension.
So how did I get to Keats and Frankenstein, I wonder? However brilliantly clear my initial thoughts were (and they were, of course), I don’t think I can now draw any particularly straight lines between these things. I know there was something in there about appreciating (for the 547th time) the beauty of how Keats explores the understanding that you don’t get one thing without the other: joy/melancholy, love/grief “good”/”bad”. ‘Joy[‘s]… hand is ever at his lips/ Bidding adieu.’ It’s all part of the same thing. This understanding can be a way to make sense of—accept—pain; properly accept, rather than collapsing, exhausted with fear, as Frost’s bird seems to.
But how sorrow works in us can depend on all sorts of things; and that’s where Frankenstein came in, because on a recent re-reading I was really brought to a halt by the narrator’s alluding to ‘these sorrows which are sent to wean us from the earth’. A striking image because, of course, weaning implies maturing and growing and I don’t want to endorse any cloyingly pious Victorian/pre-Victorian assumptions about earthly life as mere preparation for The Real Thing; nor indeed ideas about all suffering being down to attachment, or anything like that… that’s a whole pondful of weeds I don’t want to get into. What mattered to me was simpler, I think, and sadder: the sense that everybody has a limit. That sometimes pain can be too much to accept. And that took me to a moment near the end of Freud’s Last Session where Anthony Hopkins makes visible the exact moment when it finally became too hard to carry on. It’s an extraordinarily powerful piece of cinema. I cried the deepest of tears—the kind that simply roll out of your eyes and down your face—because it took me straight back to seeing that look on dad’s face when he was dying. (For me, it made it worth seeing what was otherwise a rather incoherent film.)
So… not the most linear of thought processes or columns. More like soul lint; and I did only offer you a handbag (resist the Bracknell!!)—an idiosyncratic, tangled, shaken-out-of-the-corners tumble of thoughts. But perhaps some will resonate.
*If elephants can mourn, maybe birds can fear the future. Who knows? That’s not really the point here.
