of the Harlem Renaissance engaged with death in some ways similar to those of other modernists, but their poems were also often shaped in part by the violence historically experienced by African Americans, and often linked with activism. Langston Hughes’ “Mazie Dies Alone in the City Hospital” (1928) is uniquely critical of the changes in how people died in the modern era: the speaker knows that it is wrong “[…] to die this way with the quiet/Over everything like a shroud” (lines 1–2) and observes that she would “rather die in the way [she] lived” (line 5). Hughes’ criticism of death trends shows some similarity to the ideas of the New Death, as well as a generally forward-looking awareness of what was wrong with how death was treated.
Meanwhile, Hughes’ “Dear Lovely Death” (1930) also suggests a more familiar approach to death than many modern poems. Hughes addresses Death as a friend: “Dear lovely Death/That taketh all things under wing—” (lines 1–2) and sees Death as a “change” (line 4) and a respite for “This suffering flesh” (line 6). Karla Holloway has written of how “the anticipation of death and dying figured into the experiences of black folk so persistently, given how much more omnipresent death was for them than for other Americans” (2002, p. 6). Additionally, the church remained prominent in African American life, and worked in conjunction with black funeral homes to provide a culturally distinct mode of mourning (Holloway 2002, pp.150–188), so the estrangement from both traditional religious beliefs and the funeral establishment may not have been experienced in exactly the same way in the African American community. Yet, religion remained a complex subject: in “Song for a Dark Girl” (1927), Hughes evokes a poetic tradition that viewed Christianity in part as a religion imposed upon the oppressed during slavery. The speaker views the lynched body of his lover and finds little comfort in a god who has allowed this cruel injustice:
Way Down South in Dixie
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.
(lines 5–8)
Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” (1919) reacts defiantly against deadly racial oppression. McKay’s defiance is not about refusing to die but dictating the terms of death: “What though before us lies the open grave?/Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” (lines 12–14). McKay’s depiction of death is not the meaningless awful death of many white modernists, but evokes the infliction of racist violence. McKay’s “The Lynching” (1920) is less triumphant in tone, recounting not only a murder but also the lack of remorse shown by a crowd, including women observing the body: “[…] never a one/Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue” (lines 11–12). The white children who are present suggest that this violence may continue into the next generation: “And little lads, lynchers that were to be,/Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee” (lines 13–14). The violence of murder is compounded by the crowd’s dehumanizing attitude toward the deceased. Anissa Janine Wardi argues that in the African American pastoral, for example, the “black body is at once the enslaved body—lynched, maimed, tortured, and abused by white racism and its institutionalized powers—and the ancestral body, with its accompanying folk culture and practices, spirituality, community, and kinship networks” (2003, p. 11). In poems by McKay and Hughes, the treatment of the black body—like the treatment of the black body in the funeral13—takes on particular meaning, undergone with both familiarity and respect in a process that promotes and engages with antiracist activism.
During World War II (1939–1945) American poetry continued to present a bleak view of death. Poems from the World War II years continued many of the concerns of earlier twentieth-century poems. Modernist Mina Loy’s “On Third Avenue” (1942) suggests a comparison between human lives and the passing of figures on a trolley:
Transient in the dust,
the brilliancy
of a trolley
loaded with luminous busts;
lovely in anonymity
they vanish
with the mirage
of their passage.
(p. 110)
The familiar image of dust invites a comparison of the anonymity of the city with the anonymity found in death, while the passage of figures on a trolley suggests the brevity of life. In Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945), the speaker’s sacrifice of his life in war is gruesome and meaningless. He is sacrificed not only to the war effort but to the “State” (line 1), which depersonalizes his death inside the plane into a mechanical process. His body is not handled with respect: “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose” (line 5). Death in this poem is not heroic, but horrific.
The age that had dawned in the decades following two world wars, the Holocaust, and the use of nuclear weaponry was shaped by uncertainty. Robert Lifton called this “a time of doubt about modes of continuity and connection […] at a time when the rate of historical velocity and the resulting psychohistorical dislocation had already undermined established symbols around the institutions of family, church, government, and education,” which Lifton described as a “loss of faith” in different “modes of symbolic immortality” (1973, p. 25). Anxiety about death was associated with increased medical and other efforts to prevent or delay it.14 In 1966, Robert Blauner observed that dying “at an age when their physical, social, and mental powers are at an ebb, or even absent, typically in the hospital, and often separated from family and other meaningful surroundings,” contrasted with previous eras (p. 49). We might connect these attitudes toward death with the images of rebirth in The Waste Land decades earlier, and consider the representation of desperation—in medical practice, poetic imagery—that resulted from the fear of death. It was not until the later decades of the twentieth century that various movements encouraging treating death with acceptance became more mainstream.
Yet, even in these decades poems reflect a tendency to seek comfort. A poem written in 1932 by Mary Elizabeth Frye (1905–2002) that gained popularity for use at funerals, “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep,”15 comforts the bereaved: “I am the soft stars that shine at night./Do not stand at my grave and cry,/I am not there. I did not die” (Frye 1932, lines 10–12). The poem comfortingly imagines the deceased having become a part of nature and existing in some way outside the grave. Similarly, in “the rites for Cousin Vit” (1949), Gwendolyn Brooks imagines that the loved one is more than the body in the casket: “[…] But it can’t hold her,/That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her” (lines 2–3). Brooks imagines that her loved one “rises in the sunshine” (line 6).
Preceded by a centuries-long shift away from Puritan ideas about the afterlife and toward an emphasis on the body and this life, modernists wrestled with mortality and ultimately accepted death as inevitable and final except for the prospect of becoming part of the larger universe—a part of nature, or dust to dust. For many, this made mourning more intense because the deceased person was truly gone forever and there would be no reunion with loved ones in Heaven, but at the same time the fact that there is only this life made earthly existence all the more precious.
NOTES
1 1. David Stannard estimates that only seventy-four percent of children survived as long as their tenth birthday in Andover in Puritan times, and the mortality rate was even higher in other communities such as Boston (1975, pp. 16–18).
2 2. “May 11, 1661,” “By Night When Others Soundly Slept,” and “On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet” were among poems published posthumously in 1867.