Lifsaving Lines: For Sheridan, by Robert Lowell

Anthony Wilson, , ,

The line that’s been buzzing round my head the last couple of weeks is from Robert Lowell’s heartbreaking poem ‘For Sheridan’, from his final book of poems Day by Day. The poem’s opening lines set a tone of mournful, wry regret: ‘We only live between/ before we are and what we were’.

By the poem’s final stanza, the dial has barely moved an inch. If anything, it’s gone backwards:

Past fifty, we learn with surprise and a sense
of suicidal absolution
that what we intended and failed
could never have happened—
and must be done better.

I first read these lines in my twenties, when fifty seemed an impossible milestone. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Now I can’t get past those two simple words. Partly this is because I can’t quite persuade myself to believe in ‘suicidal absolution’. It just just seems too stagey and performative to me. Not to mention completely abstract. What Seamus Heaney once said of his early poem ‘Digging’, that it possessed something of the gunslinger about it, comes to mind.

But: ‘what we intended and failed/ could never have happened—/ and must be done better’: now you’re talking. Past fifty, that is all that is going on. Looking back, wondering if it was good enough (mostly not), and looking forward at what must be ‘done better’.

Learning is taking place here, but it is slow, painful and not glorious-looking, like in the films. Past fifty, like ‘awful but cheerful’ and ‘badly-lit’, is where a lot of life is being lived right now, for me, literally, and figuratively, too. I’d like to think I am learning, slowly to get it ‘done better’. (Perhaps that’s not even for me to say.) Past fifty. Past fifty. I can’t them out of my head.

Published by Anthony Wilson

I am a lecturer, poet and writing tutor. I work in teacher and medical education at the University of Exeter. My anthology Lifesaving Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. In 2012 I published Riddance (Worple Press), a collection of poems, and Love for Now (Impress Books), a memoir, about my experience of cancer. The Wind and the Rain, my sixth collection of poems, is available now from Blue Diode Publishing. My current research project, funded by the Foyle Foundation, is Young Poets' Stories: https://youngpoetsstories.com/. This blog is archived by the British Library.

13 Comments

  1. I am reminded of my favorite line from a musical comedy. From Finian’s Rainbow, “Things are hopeless. Hopeless! But they’re not serious.” I’m way past fifty, totting up what did and didn’t happen, and these days I take comfort in lines from Antonio Machado:

    “Last night as I was sleeping,
    I dreamt—marvelous error!—
    that I had a beehive
    here inside my heart.
    And the golden bees
    were making white combs
    and sweet honey
    from my old failures.”

    Molly

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  5. I will be sixty this Wednesday. This poem tells me what I already had to learn the hard way (only way?). We make plans and think what we will be like in the future, never expecting anything will get in the way. Now I am glad many things did not come to pass and many unexpected ones are full of joy and mystery to me still. Thank you for the poem.

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  6. I will be sixty this Wednesday. This poem tells me what I already had to learn the hard way (only way?). We make plans and think what we will be like in the future, never expecting anything will get in the way. Now I am glad many things did not come to pass and many unexpected ones are full of joy and mystery to me still. Thank you for the poem.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

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