John Ashbery’s “This Room” makes an appearance in this survey of poetry that might speak to the COVID-19 pandemic, a piece by Seth Perlow in The Washintgon Post.
PostEverything Perspective
The poetry that speaks best to the pandemic
From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop, poets remind us that it doesn’t take a pandemic to leave us feeling lonesome.
A man walks around Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, New York on March 14, 2020. (JEENNAH MOON/Washington Post )
By Seth Perlow
Seth Perlow teaches English at Georgetown University. He is the author of “The Poem Electric: Technology and the American Lyric.”
June 11, 2020 at 12:25 p.m. EDT
When something terrible happens, I choose a poem to share with my students, one that might offer a little solace. I learned this trick in college. After the 9/11 attacks, one of my professors shared W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” a poem that warns, “We must love one another or die.” So when my students did not return to campus after spring break, when they instead appeared on my laptop screen, each alone in their childhood bedroom, I decided to look for a poem that might help us feel less isolated in this time of social distancing. The poems I found instead reminded me that it doesn’t take a pandemic to feel lonesome. Some of the most famous poems are about solitude, which won’t come as a surprise if you’ve met a poet. As we all stay home, these verses about isolation can help us see that social life is always about distance, one way or another.
My search began with a famous poem about solitude by William Wordsworth, which opens like this:
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils.
Long story short, the flowers cheer him up. The rest of the poem is about what “a jocund company” they make. Instead of lamenting dismal isolation, he ends up praising “the bliss of solitude,” from which he remembers the daffodils. This wistful conclusion might ring hollow when you learn that the poem was inspired by a real walk the poet took with his sister, Dorothy, whom he conveniently pushed out of the frame to paint a more solitary verbal picture of the day.
Writing around 1,100 years earlier, the Chinese poet Li Bai offers short, vivid poems that capture more genuine sadness:
Moonlight before my bed
Perhaps frost on the ground.
Lift my head and see the moon
Lower my head and I miss my home.
Such spare, piercing verses are not reserved for poets of the distant past, however. If you miss the friends and lovers who made you who you are, think of “Separation,” a three-liner by W.S. Merwin:
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
Separation from those who crowd our daily lives can bring to mind more powerfully the people who really matter. Maybe that’s why so many of us have been reconnecting with longtime friends who live too far away for the local happy hour.
When I searched my own syllabi for poems about loneliness, those that I found tended to focus on missing a specific individual, as the Merwin poem does. A favorite of this kind is by Anne Bradstreet, who wrote “A Letter to her Husband, absent upon Publick employment” around 1642, while he was away founding Boston. Bradstreet asks bluntly why they must remain apart, when such a strong bond draws them together: “If two be one, as surely thou and I, / How stayest thou there, whilst I at Ipswich lie?” In such poems, to long for an individual serves to conjure a general lonesomeness. Elizabeth Bishop’s wrenching villanelle, “One Art,” can be seen this way. A report on “the art of losing,” it starts with the local and trivial, “lost door keys, the hour badly spent,” and then zooms out to show bigger losses, “two cities … two rivers, a continent,” before at last returning to the more intimate scale to identify the greatest loss of all, “losing you.”
Other poets, including some of Bishop’s contemporaries, have shown that distance from a special someone can make a full house seem vacant. Few underscore this as poignantly as Frank O’Hara, a man so popular that at his funeral someone offered these words: “Frank O’Hara was my best friend. There are at least 60 people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend.” Despite all that company, O’Hara turns the intimate distance of lost love into an almost paradoxical lament. In the final lines of “Morning,” he calls out,
if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go.
Yes, separation from just one person can make the world seem empty; no wonder the quarantine is such an ordeal.
None of these poems felt right for my students today, possibly because social distancing is different from these more familiar forms of absence — and from poems of mourning, an ancient and uniquely depressing genre all its own. Now our partners and children and housemates are often the only ones we can still get close to — perhaps a bit too close. And when I connect with my students or friends via Zoom, our conversations rarely mask the fact that we’re each alone with our computers. Such is the experience of being “alone together,” to borrow a phrase from Sherry Turkle. What we’ve lost is the less intimate closeness of strangers, the ease of opening a door for someone, or shaking hands, or sharing the sidewalk comfortably, or even, with apologies to O’Hara, having a Coke with you. As a friend recently posted on Twitter, “I miss overhearing things.” The most interesting poems of social distance are those that address this more complex loneliness.
The effort to remain six feet from others on the sidewalk, meanwhile, makes a ballet of this fact known to all city dwellers: The street is where “social” and “distance” meet. In “To a Passerby,” the French poet Charles Baudelaire recounts his infatuation with a beautiful woman whom he knows he’ll never see again. It’s an experience specific to Baudelaire’s 19th-century flânerie — strolling through the world as the world flows around you — but it should be familiar to anyone who’s watched a masked stranger float past their window. As Claude McKay’s “On Broadway” reminds us, we can feel lonesome even on a busy street: “Oh wonderful is Broadway — only / My heart, my heart is lonely.” As an African American writing about the Great White Way in the 1920s, McKay may allude to an especially damaging kind of exclusion. But his poem also makes the broader point that even if I could immerse myself in a crowd, I might still feel alone. Another city poet, John Ashbery, keeps the social distance inside in “This Room,” a poem of droll claustrophobia. “Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine,” the poet muses, sounding like someone stuck inside for weeks. “We had macaroni for lunch every day,” he recalls, as if predicting my own lockdown menu. Like O’Hara’s poem above, this one ends with a strange call to absent others: “Why do I tell you these things? / You are not even here.” Both of these calls to “you” seem directed at someone almost too distant to hear. They invoke the same feelings of emptiness and distance that now pervade our ersatz social lives online.
Like the contagion we’re fighting, the poetry of social distance is not confined to small apartments and city streets. In fact, rural settings can highlight how distance structures social life. Your closest neighbor might live miles away, but you might know her better than if she lived across the hall in an apartment building. Robert Frost chronicles these rural dynamics in “Mending Wall,” which recounts how two neighbors meet each springtime on opposite sides of the stacked-stone wall that divides their properties. Stones keep rolling off the wall, so they walk the line yearly, replacing fallen rocks as they go. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” the poem begins. Tell me about it, I think from my home office. Eventually, the speaker tries to convince his neighbor that they
do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines.
In response to this sensible point, the neighbor gives his famous refrain: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker of Frost’s poem doesn’t seem to understand, but perhaps the reader will. It’s not just that fences help us respect social boundaries. Rather, the wall that separates these neighbors also gives them a reason to meet up and work together.
As I tell my students when I teach “Mending Wall,” that stone wall gives us a rich figure for the balance of contact and separation that keeps the social fabric together. When I shared the poem this semester, I also suggested that the wall provides a close analogue for the ethos of social distancing we’ve adopted: What good neighbors do together is put up barriers between each other, and it’s by our very separation that we work together. Like the neighbor’s terse and initially puzzling aphorism, the now-familiar term “social distance” at first had an oxymoronic texture. How inapt that the most prosocial thing we can do is to avoid one another. But lots of great poems about social life recognize that distance plays a role in even our most intimate social moments. Poets remind us that deep feelings of isolation can arise even when we’ve got company, that our most powerful connections may be those that bridge the greatest distances and that sometimes, the best thing we can do for our social worlds is to maintain walls between us.