“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is” Saul Bellow writes in Herzog, his masterful novel of middle-aged angst. For millenia, poets have found such “intrusions of beauty” in death and shaped intricate verse from the bittersweetness of grief. Among the endless volumes of love poetry, one often misses the poignant depictions of grief and death that are the true masterpieces of the poetic canon. Perhaps it is because death is the only consistent fate which all of us must meet or maybe it is our obssession with the lives of the no longer living, but poets have written about death for longer than humans have believed in Heaven and Hell. Whether it is Catullus mourning the death of his brother or Rafael Campo writing verse in the middle of the HIV/AIDS crisis, their poems reveal humanity’s fascination with death, the various forms of mourning, and most important, the inconsequential nature of humanity and healers in the face of death.
Catullus, the great Roman poet most famous for his racy love poems, touches elegantly upon the subject of death in quite a number of his poems, particularly in “Catullus 65.” This poem describes the process of mourning and Catullus’ grief for the death of his brother. “I am withdrawn,” Catullus writes in “Catullus 65,” “from the learned Virgins, nor is my soul's mind able to bring forth the sweet fruit of the Muses (so much does it waver amidst ills: for but lately the wave of the Lethean stream washes with its flow the poor, pale foot of my brother, whom the land of Troy crushes beneath the Rhoetean shore, stolen from our eyes” (lines 1-8). “Catullus 65” is truly about the power of grief to distract us from the tasks we undertake so diligently and with such passion under normal circumstances. The image of the “pale foot” of one’s brother washed away by Lethe, a river in the Greco-Roman underworld whose waters are synonymous with forgetfulness, speaks beautifully both to the pain of losing a loved one and recognizing that they have fallen into the oblivion and nonexistence of the sweeping waters of death.
“Never again will I hear you speak, never again, O brother, more lovable than life, will I see you. But surely I will always love you, always will I sing elegies made gloomy by your death,” Catullus addresses his brother (lines 10-12). Catullus describes his brother as more “lovable than life.” His fraternal love is so great that even death cannot halt its advance, even when he is occupied with dirges “made gloomy by [his] death.” In “Catullus 65,” Catullus uses his sparse verse to describe the raw emotions of grief. More than that, Catullus emphasizes the importance of memory and honoring the dead as their earthly spirits make their way through the divine unknown of the underworld. Catullus speaks to the ways in which grief and mourning are deeply connected to the actions of one’s everyday lives. As a poet, Catullus is reliant on compassion and experience, yet he finds his powers of humanity and healing suffering under the burden of grief.
More than two thousand years after Catullus mourned the death of his brother, a doctor in Boston named Rafael Campo found himself in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Campo, who spent years treating HIV/AIDS victims, is also an accomplished poet. Writing in the mid 1990s of his daily encounters with death, Campo sounds almost like Catullus, a humanist healer lost and surrounded with grief and the grieving. In “Lost in the Hospital,” Campo describes his experience of dying HIV/AIDS victims in a hospital. “My friend, the one who’s dying,” he writes, “took me out/ To where the patients go to smoke, IVs/ And oxygen in tanks attached to them—/ A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared/ A cigarette, which was delicious but/ Too brief” (lines 5-10). Unlike Catullus, Campo speaks not of the grand visions of the underworld, but of the small moments before death that hold so much meaning. Both Campo and Catullus speak to the fear of forgetting, the terror of inevitable oblivion that comes with grief and the feeling of being “lost” that comes from close encounters with death.
Capturing the precious moments of tenderness before death, Campo writes, “How beautiful it was,/ The sunlight pointing down at us, as if/ We were important, full of life, unbound./I wandered for a moment where his ribs/ Had made a space for me, and there, beside/ The thundering waterfall of his heart,/ I rubbed my eyes and thought, ‘I’m lost’” (lines 11-17). Surrounded by death, Campo is disillusioned with any notion of the importance of life. Touching a dying man as the sun shines, he is struck by how small we are and how arbitrary death is. He is “lost” because death seems to undermine every meaning that humans try to place upon life. Campo may describe a cigarette shared with a man dying of HIV/AIDS in the mid 1990s and Catullus the moments of immobilizing grief after a death in the Mediterranean empire of the first century B.C.E., but both capture the pain of a humanitarian who sees a small part of humanity disappear into nonexistence.
Stylistically, the two poems are suprisingly similar. Both Catullus and Campo write with a raw and personal voice. Sparse and short, their poetry is filled with images, moments, and thoughts that are left for the reader to string together. Much like our understanding of death, they delve into absurdity yet stay perfectly grounded in moments of intense emotion. Catullus’ muses are mute in the face of death and Campo’s medicine is powerless to halt the onslaught of oblivion. Reading them side-by-side, one is struck at the universal nature of grief, at the timelessness of the wanderings of a poet trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, trying to explain the “unexpected intrusions of beauty.”