When Poets Face Death

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Early-career poetry poses tantalizing questions: How did this poet start off so terrible—and end up so good? Or, more rarely: How did they start off so good—and get so much better? But a writer’s final works are compelling for a different reason: They offer not a preview or a draft, but an opportunity to reflect, sometimes with a critical eye, on past ideas and commitments.

The American poet Wallace Stevens published his last work in The Atlantic in April 1955, four months before he died of stomach cancer. “July Mountain” is an homage to Vermont in the summer—surprising, perhaps, for this poet with a “mind of winter.” It’s also a digest, in 10 lines, of Stevens’s lifelong preoccupations, and a clear expression of his desire to make order out of a chaotic, suffocating world. Like many poems shadowed by mortality, “July Mountain” has what the late literary critic Helen Vendler called “binocular vision,” focused on both life and death. This, according to Vendler, is the peculiar power of a poet’s final works.

Knowing the end was near, Stevens wanted to look at things as a whole to understand how the parts of his life fit together. The poem starts by describing life as a messy, mixed-up place, which he calls, metaphorically, a “constellation / Of patches and of pitches.” Nothing belongs where it is; everything is held together like a quilt, or a cacophony of sounds.

Stevens is hardly alone in his poetic end-of-life musings. His contemporary, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, wrote ruefully about his waning poetic powers in “The Circus Animal’s Desertion,” published in The Atlantic in January 1939, the month of his death at age 73. In this apocalyptic depiction of writer’s block, Yeats, who frequently wrote about people he knew, stares at a blank page, desperate for a topic.

He worries that his poetry has reduced the real people in his life—such as the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne—to circus animals, and he looks back on his Nobel Prize–winning poetry with a shudder: “Players and painted stage took all my love / And not those things that they were emblems of.” But in the process of revisiting and renouncing his favorite images, Yeats constructed an exquisite, moving piece of verse—and a kind of exorcism, too, which left him, in the poem’s memorable final image, with the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

Late poems like Yeats’s make unexpected gestures of renewal, even as they acknowledge that things are swiftly coming to an end. Nikki Giovanni, who died last month at age 81, ruminated on her legacy in “The Coal Cellar.” The poem, published in The Atlantic in 2021, follows Giovanni down to her grandparents’ cellar, in Knoxville, Tennessee. (Her poem extends a long tradition of poems that take place underground, though this is the only one I can think of that is set in an Appalachian cellar.) Giovanni’s guide is her grandmother, who uncovers a box with a blackened sterling-silver spoon and fork belonging to her great-grandmother, the “first person born free.”

The poem asks a binocular question: What has the poet inherited? And what might others inherit from her words? For Giovanni, the gift isn’t something material:

Maybe not a big bank account or trust fund
And certainly not any property but I inherited
A morning and a great deal of knowledge
In a cold coal cellar
With my grandmother

What she brings up from the cellar is a promise to her grandmother to polish the silver, a commitment to carry the knowledge of the past. In an essay published shortly after Giovanni’s death, my colleague Jenisha Watts wrote that the poet “saw her knowledge and experience as things she wanted to pass along, so that others might be able to speak after she was gone.”

The challenge of a late poem is to find a symbol like Giovanni’s—silver, retrieved from a coal cellar—that helps the poet frame or englobe their life. In the last two lines of “July Mountain,” Stevens comes up with the perfect solution: a view from a mountain, where the climber can face death with awe and astonishment at the way a life “throws itself” together, like a landscape seen, at last, from the highest point.

The ending of his poem isn’t sad or melancholy, but it is final (we can’t climb any higher) and a little resigned (we are spectators of what our life has become, and perhaps we were spectators, with partial views, all along). Yet the image that remains is one of abundance and wonder—at the sudden panoramic view of Vermont in the summer, as though everything that was the past is here again at once, while the eyes take in the canopy of green, the color of beginning.