By Robert Cording

October 14, 2022, was the fifth anniversary of our son Daniel’s death. “Anniversary”—I use the word to mean the date on which an event took place. Not a celebration but the marking of something like the start of a war or, in our case, the day our lives changed irrevocably. The word comes from the Latin anniversarius, returning yearly, from annus, year, and versus, turning. This day that returns each year is like the turning and returning of the line in (versus) poetry; or, if one thinks of versus’s origin, the turn and return of the plow for planting. Of course, an anniversary is also an occasion that asks one to look back over what has passed—like the forty years of marriage which my wife and I just celebrated. A marriage that includes the birth of our three sons, the death of one of them, and the intimacies of love and suffering that have come with our time together.

Reflecting one recent afternoon on what has passed these five years, I began reciting to myself the opening of Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey”:

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.—Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thought of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The full title of the poem tells us the “waters” are the River Wye. Wordsworth is “revisiting” Tintern Abbey five years since he was last there. Some years ago, we brought Daniel there who loved the abbey made famous by the justly famous poem. I can see him taking photograph after photograph of the remaining ruins. He loved architecture, studied it in college and in a summer program at Harvard. In a bureau drawer in my study, I have some of the drawings he made that summer and, later, for his business. One of the things I miss most is talking with him about his jobs, or about our own house (built in 1790) with which he was always helping me, or his own 1830s house.

“Tintern Abbey” the poem is an argument: in part about memory and what it brings back and how it can be refreshed; in part about the natural world and how close contact with it can lighten the weight of the world and even make one a better, more serene person. But the thrust of the main argument is that, while Wordsworth no longer has (nor can have) the physical relationship he had with nature as a child, there has been “abundant recompense:” the philosophic mind that quiets the earlier childlike pleasures and allows a “serene and blessed mood” to “see into the life of things.” Though that earlier time was replete with the paradise of “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures,” now the mystery of life and the “sad music of humanity” are a necessary fall into the knowledge of how the natural world can still be a guide to our minds, leading us to bear witness to the deep interconnectedness of all things.

“Tintern Abbey” is a poem I love, have taught countless times, but always find myself in the maze of its in-between: in-between its beauty as a poem and an argument that seems generated more by Wordsworth’s need for assurance than belief. It is a quarrel with himself. There is a recognition of the relation- ship between the world we live in and our own minds, what we “half create, and what perceive.” And there is also what seems like a desperate hope that all is not lost with loss. That loss of his physical relationship with nature brings about the maturity to see the connections between himself and the world he lives within. I don’t doubt that kind of seeing. Wordsworth’s loss and mine are quite different, but our need to make sense of that loss is similar. When I suddenly began reciting his poem that afternoon, I realized my own need to make my son’s death have meaning in my life, to have taught me something I needed to know.

As soon as I began thinking of these past five years, I realized that the loss of one’s child has no silver lining. And grief and suffering have no nobility I’d like to argue for. They are simply what they are: numbing, painful, reductive, life-denying. They blunt our sense of gratefulness, and of praise. They place one, finally, in a permanent in-between: in-between utter sorrow and utter love. And yet, as Wordsworth understood, life itself returns one to life. The newly-seen loved landscape on the banks of the Wye revivifies Wordsworth— “these waters”; “these steep and lofty cliffs”; “this dark sycamore”; “these plots of cottage-ground”; “these orchard-tufts”; and “these hedge-rows.” So too has the view outside my study’s three windows—of the wafting, feathery top branches of thirty-foot larches; of the cap of seven goldfinches on the feeder; of the barn where Daniel’s best friend continues his business—helped draw my attention outward toward the ordinary expansiveness of what goes on.

Wordsworth’s poem opens with a surge of remembrance. His need to list each particular of the scene is connected to our human fear of oblivion, that both the things and the people we love simply disappear without a trace as time passes. Dante’s dead constantly ask to be remembered; remembrance is our antidote to oblivion. Remembrance needs particulars, the thisness of a sycamore or my larches and, harder because more painful, the voice of a loved one, the way he or she smiled or laughed. Remembrance is painful because it requires an embrace of that which has been lost. In Wordsworth’s case, the Wye Valley is, as yet, unchanged and the result is the joy of beholding once again what was once loved and, later, often remembered. I use “behold” in its biblical context: the word is usually uttered as either a command or an invitation. It marks a rupture with the usual way of seeing. When we behold we are held by what we are looking at. This kind of beholding applies to grief as well as joy.

For me, a kind of slow revival has taken place over these long years. At first, there was the coma-like first year of grief where time lost all its human de- marcations. Each day was simply a repetition of the day before, like a run-on sentence without syntax or punctuation. Every memory was deeply painful, a reminder not of what I had, but of what I’d lost. It was almost impossible to look outward, though the landscape around me seemed to wait patiently for my return. Usually I confined myself to one window, outside of which was a host of feeders. Watching hummingbirds take their long late September drinks at the red sugar-water feeders before beginning their long migrations; noting that the goldfinches were turning from bright yellow to duller greens as the days got shorter; seeing that the sleek and nattily-feathered cedar waxwings had flocked once again on the winterberry to feed on their way by—all these moments were attempts to change my perspective, to look outward. The second, third, and fourth years were filled with vain attempts to restore in writing what I had lost in life. I tried talking to my son in my poems; in prose, I gave him things to say, made him my wise Shakespearean fool who taught me, through sarcasm and wit, to stop trying to make sense of what was senseless. This fifth year brought a kind of reckoning: I had not learned anything from my son’s death. And a more powerful, more apt recognition: that there was nothing to learn. I think my instinct at first was to understand, to make sense of what did not make sense. Perhaps it was just my old ego insisting on control. But what makes grief grief is the way it lies beyond our control. Willfulness, which asks for a way to map loss, for the magical steps with which to succeed in one’s mourning, is simply wrongheaded. What mattered in the end was simply living each day with my son’s death. I lived more fully when I held my grief close, made it intimate, and never tried to sidestep it. When I allowed myself to behold and be held by my son’s loss.

Paul said Christian thinking is “folly,” the folly of the cross. As First Corinthians 18 explains: “for the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perish- ing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” My folly: I believe our loved dead live when we allow the absence and pain of their departure to be filled by the presence of our love. Birth, death, and love are the central mysteries of our lives. The death of a child involves a parent in all three of these mys- teries. In a play based on his experiences in World War One during which the philosopher Gabriel Marcel had to notify and meet with parents regarding the death of their child, Marcel has a character say of her dead son, “When I think of him in a certain way—with tenderness, with recollection—there wells up in me something like a richer, deeper life in which I know he participates. This life is not I, nor is it he; it is both of us.” This passage is more about remembrance than memory; it is about the power of love which allows one to feel the deceased loved one as an accompanying presence. I feel that my son accompanies me, that love is what goes on in death, after death, in life that accompanies death. It is like the biblical: “Behold.” Daniel’s presence, like the presence of the birds I spoke of earlier or the litany of hedge-rows and cliffs that Wordsworth beheld once again, calls to something in me to answer. It is as if I am being addressed, called on to meet the fullness of his death and the absence it left behind with the fullness of my attention.

Though “Tintern Abbey” is not written from within a Christian framework, I have always thought of Wordsworth as beginning from the same place as myself: with the natural world before him. With what is. Or as Paul says, “Ever since the creation of the world, the invisible essence of God and his everlasting power have been clearly seen in the mind’s understanding of created things” (Romans 1:20). As “Tintern Abbey” puts it: Wordsworth is a lover of “all that we behold / From this green earth; of all the mighty world / Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, / And what perceive.” My childhood Sunday School classes said it more simply: we know God through the things God made. What Wordsworth felt as a child (and why he can’t “paint what then I was”) was the reality of the natural world experienced in its most unexplained, unadulterated, and uncontrolled state, which was, at times, a frightening awe-filled state. Wordsworth remembers times when he was “more like a man / Flying from something he dreads, than one / Who sought the thing he loved.” For me, this is where religion begins. With the awe- filled, awful astonishment of what is, with the thisness of a rock or bird or person (in terms of the full complexity and contradictoriness of his their humanity) that are experienced rather than understood as an idea or as a concept in a book.

Death has such thisness. It removes the usual barriers the mind erects and forces us to face what our rational mind cannot make sense of. It reminds us with brutal honesty and force that we cannot fix the problem of our broken- ness. What I distrust in “Tintern Abbey” (and lovingly understand) is all those affirmations that want to assure Wordsworth of the rationality of his argu- ment: “If this / Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft . . . in spirit, have I turned to thee, / O sylvan Wye!”; or “Not for this [all those ‘dizzy raptures’] / Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur”; and then in the totally-unprepared-for last move of the poem’s argument, he brings in his sister Dorothy (who is missing from the poem up to this last stanza) in whom he sees his earlier self and who will remember (as in, please, do not forget) how they stood together before this landscape that was so dear to him. I am not interested in finding fault—the poem is a much better poem for its tension between desire for renewal and the possibility that the “recompense” for his loss will be less than desired. And Wordsworth (the person and the character speaking in the poem) is even more touching for his strong sense of the goodness in the natural world. But I think what Wordsworth truly feels is the way love goes on. His love for the world before him is perhaps summed up in Ezra Pound’s line from The Pisan Cantos: “What thou lovest well remains.” In fact Pound’s line comes closer to the truth than Wordsworth’s line in “Tintern Abbey”—“Nature never did betray / The heart that loves her.” Wordsworth himself will later recant this position in his poem “Elegiac Stanzas,” a poem written after his brother John’s drowning at sea, and seven years after “Tintern Abbey.”

We suffer because things happen that we cannot control. Wordsworth cannot prevent the loss of his childhood self. He cannot prevent the storm at sea. Or his brother’s death. Surely “Tintern Abbey” was written to transform his loss, his grief over this new self that acknowledges the “burthen of the mystery,” the “sad music of humanity” in which we all participate. He trusts that he has been compensated for his loss by the “joy of elevated thoughts” that connects the mind of man to the interconnectedness of the sun, ocean, air, and earth. I feel that connection myself, the mystery that the world we live in is intelligible, though never fully explainable. I am faithful to birds and woods, to rivers and flowers, to the “good” of creation that Genesis speaks of. But as the God of Job makes clear, the vision in Genesis of the goodness of creation includes the Behemoth, the forces of disorder and chaos. To experience the profound thisness of things does not mean those things care about us or our well-being. That is Wordsworth’s heart-breaking discovery as he looks at Beaumont’s painting of Peele Castle in a storm and connects that storm to his brother’s loss at sea and, more importantly, to his earlier illusions about a nature, which if loved, will never betray him. In “Elegiac Stanzas,” he admits, “A power is gone, which nothing can restore; / A deep distress hath humanised my soul.”

Grief is not something one gets over. Yet, as Wordsworth learns, that is not a human failure, but a humanizing. What is that humanizing that takes the “deep distress” of his brother’s death to be realized? I would say that it involves three things in my experience. I have mentioned one already: allowing myself to be held by Daniel’s death. When I say this, I don’t mean to imply we can hold on to our loved ones.

We can accompany them. But their path is one that always takes them away from us. These five past years have been a letting go. The paradox: I can both let go and bring back in love and remembrance. A second experience has been harder: that my grief is part of a larger landscape of grief. It is not more or less important than the grief of so, so many others but rather a common bond. A humanizing. If we are human, we will suffer loss after loss, and realize, as Wordsworth did, that such loss and sorrow and suffering are not wasted, but are rather the very aspects of living that open us to others and their losses and pain. The distress of his brother’s drowning “humanised my soul,” Wordsworth wrote, and I think he chooses this word quite carefully. I like to think of the soul as an organ of awareness, both body and spirit, capable of thinking and feeling simultaneously and that which wakes us, both to the loss and grief that is always near and the ongoing love that accompanies it.

Wordsworth has been my constant companion since my college years. I first heard my poetic voice in his, and I felt my own abiding faith in the goodness of creation in his poems. He taught me that the world is always waiting to be seen and, if seen, it can shift our perspective. “Tintern Abbey” says “Behold.” It says

that to behold is a way of being held. In the poem he is held by the landscape he loves, though he cannot make it mean what he wants. I cannot hold my son ever again. I cannot hold on to his life, which is gone. Though I practice listening to his voice in my mind, and looking at photographs of him every day, he is, as I said, always moving away. Letting him go is my only way of being held. When I let him go, I go with him, outward toward those goldfinches at the feeder just outside my window. They are not him. They are not a replacement. They are what they are. Goldfinches that brighten the day but will turn a dull green soon enough as the days shorten and move toward November’s daily grayness. I will go on. I will look at the goldfinches. I will mourn my son each of my remaining days. A deep distress has humanized my soul.

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Robert Cording has published ten collections of poems including Only So Far and Without My Asking (CavanKerry Press) and his newest, In the Unwalled City (Slant, 2022). A book on poetry, the Bible, and metaphor, Finding the World’s Fullness, is also out from Slant. He has received two NEAs in poetry and his poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Common, AGNI, Orion, and Best American Poetry 2018.