The Corinna Posts 1: "Lycidas" and Loss
My oldest friend died ten months ago, and I’ve been writing about her ever since: Facebook posts, her obituary, a list of things I wish I could tell her in my Notes app (created four days after she died, when I desperately wished we could gossip about her pre-cremation memorial), a google doc called Corinna Diary that I started a couple of days after that (it’s up to 38 single-spaced and surely deranged pages that I haven’t yet dared to read). But I want to do some more choate writing about her, and I’m going to try doing it here.
One of the things that struck me when Corinna died was how many people told me we do not do justice to the pain of losing a friend. But this was not my experience, starting with the heartfelt acknowledgements of my loss that always accompanied that claim.
On Facebook, where Corinna had a forceful presence and we had a large shared circle (it happens when you’ve been friends for decades), I got more than 100 comments on my post about her death, all of them lovely, many of them about our friendship. In the first days after she died, when I could barely speak, ignored emails, and let all calls go to voicemail, my sister told me she would come take a walk with me and my cousin announced she was bringing me lunch, both of them determined, thank goodness, to show up in the old-fashioned in-person way. For weeks, friends texted to check in, over and over, even when the only response I could manage was a heart emoji.
But it wasn’t just my personal experience that made me skeptical of that claim. As a…how to describe myself here? former English professor? incessant reader? person who derives her understanding of the world as much from the written word as from air, trees, and sunlight? As all those things, I was struck by how the claim that we don’t sufficiently attend to the loss of a friend belies the history of elegy.
Elegies are poems that mourn the dead. If that sounds unfamiliar, you still might know W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” the elegy Matthew reads at Gareth’s funeral in Four Weddings and a Funeral, the one that begins “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” and breaks everyone’s heart at “He was my North, my South, my East and West.”
But if you ever studied or taught English literature, especially back in the day, you probably know lots of elegies. And two of the most foundational are John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1638) and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), which are both about…wait for it…friends.
Once I started thinking about elegies for friends, I couldn’t stop. I remembered more of them, I googled, I started a list, it expanded from poems to books, I wondered if Beaches counts, I thought maybe I should write a book about elegy and friendship (which was classic: for the last several years, a chronic injury has largely kept me from running, but every time I manage a short run without pain, I start planning my next marathon). Yet in all that time, which was months, I didn’t read a single elegy. I compiled them, there they were, and I couldn’t do it.
Finally, which is to say a couple of days ago, I bit the bullet and reread “Lycidas” (I want to reread In Memoriam, but it’s very long and I’m not ready).
I first read “Lycidas” in high school. I read it again my first semester of college, in the prerequisite course for the English major. Then I read it my first semester of grad school, in an elective Milton seminar. Which should tell you how significant “Lycidas” is (or maybe was). But for all that reading, I mostly remembered the flowers, because the flowers of “Lycidas” are a thing.
It turns out there aren’t as many flowers as my recollection would have it. If you count trees, herbs, and vines, only 24 of the poem’s 193 lines contain flora (aka not fauna). Nevertheless, those flowers do a lot of intensive pathetic fallacy (projecting feelings onto nature) work: “the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,” “cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,” “every flower that sad embroidery wears,” “daffadillies fill their cups with tears.” Victorian cultural critic John Ruskin thought the pathetic fallacy was the lamest, and he’s not the only one. But it works. I feel sad every time I read the sad flora in “Lycidas.”
Besides the pretty obvious flowers, “Lycidas” is pretty dense. And allegorical, symbolic, pastoral, and political, which I’m not going to get into, despite the time I spent with the footnotes in my copy of John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (1957, hardcover, 2 1/2 inches thick).
But the thing that struck me most, after the strikingly sad flowers, is that Edward King, Milton’s friend, barely appears in his own elegy, at least as a real person. King drowned, as does Lycidas (the ship/drowning/water sections are something), and he was about to become a minister (he had recently graduated from Cambridge, where he met Milton), hence a lot of Christian-inflected shepherd/miserable sheep language (sheep are essential to pastoral elegy, and these sheep are also part of Milton’s political allegory). But there is nothing else about King as a specific human being. He is allegorically and metaphorically celebrated and mourned. Then he ascends to Heaven, which officially makes everything OK.
This is all appropriate to 17th c. poetry, and for me it was both off-putting and seductive: I at once wanted to skim the wordy, boring parts and couldn’t resist the footnotes (perhaps this is related to the fact that I was once but am no longer an English professor). And yet, even with the dead friend stripped of his own identity, even with his ascension to “the best Kingdom” to hang with “the Saints above,” even with the last line which has the poet moving on “Tomorrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new,” there is still a sense that the loss of the friend has made everything different, left the whole world changed. Maybe that’s because “Tomorrow” is still in the future, an aspiration not yet realized. Maybe it’s because even though Lycidas is happy in heaven and “the Shepherds weep no more,” his death remains a fact in the world of the living. Maybe it’s because we never see happy flowers.
Maybe all I really want to say is that nearly 500 years later, when so much of the poetics that power “Lycidas” require footnotes to decipher, the poem itself still powerfully conveys loss (especially when you skim the wordy, boring parts). And I wonder if that’s at least in part because it’s a poem about losing a friend, and losing a friend might be essence of loss.
We choose our friends, they are various, and we relate to them in all sorts of ways. There is no established apparatus for friendship - or for the loss of a friend. No Victorian mourning rules, no wills, no inheritances (or not), no obligations that suddenly appear or vanish, no empty cradle, no cane to dispose of (or not - my father-in-law’s remains in the trunk of my car nine years later). Friends rarely appear in obituaries, which always include a family list. The Hallmark website’s selection of sympathy cards offers a choice of mother, father, husband, wife, child, grandparent, relative, and pet (in that fascinating order). At Jewish funerals, only family members participate in kriah, the ritual rending of garments. These private and public apparatuses make the death of a family member legible, both to those left behind and to everyone around them.
So there is certainly truth in the idea that we don’t sufficiently attend to the death of a friend, if what we mean is that we lack cultural apparatus for that attention, which may also be what I mean when I say that losing a friend is essence of loss.
And yet, I would argue that we nevertheless create our own apparatus as we mourn a dead friend or comfort a mourner: in elegies; in 19th-century condolence letters and 21st-century text messages; in walks (the social emotional apparatus of the middle-aged woman: when I was finally ready - that is, desperately needed - to talk about losing Corinna, I called a friend who had lost her oldest friend several years earlier, and we of course went for a walk). As I noted above, everyone who told me we don’t acknowledge the death of a friend was in the process of acknowledging it. And perhaps these improvisational, interpersonal apparatuses are exactly right for the improvisational, interpersonal nature of friendship.
Corinna no longer dominates my life, my thoughts, my interactions with others, as she did in the months before and after her death. I still think of her every day, I still miss her desperately, but at the same time as I remember her so acutely, I feel her slipping away from me, leaving me here, like the poet in “Lycidas,” moving forward but still carrying the essence of loss.
Because we still deserve nice things…
The words come with me tonight, all across the universe were stuck in my head with a bit of a melody but no actual music, which is how music usually gets stuck in my head: a fragment of words or music repeating over and over (wait, is that how music gets stuck in everyone’s head?). I had no idea what it was (my musical memory is atrocious and if you’re rolling your eyes, I definitely deserve it). Fortunately, we have google, and of course it’s “Star Love” by Cheryl Lynn, who apparently is still at it, recently went viral on TikTok, and owns her masters so gets the money (of course I kept googling). It sent me right back and got me dancing right here. Highly recommended.
Also wondering if this earworm was related to writing about Corinna, who was the queen of disco amongst the Deadheads and jazz afficionados of our early 1980s (though everyone danced to disco, even if despite themselves)
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I assume you know W.S. Merwin’s tiny poem, “Elegy”?
That song! Thank you for writing this and all of your other Corinna writing. It's helped me process some jagged friend grief I didn't realize I was still carrying.