In his key book of 1972, Ways of Seeing, John Berger presented us with an image of Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, then asked us to turn the page where he showed us the picture again, this time with the text: “This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself.” He pondered on how exactly the words had changed the image: what we say and what we know are a part of what we see. Retrospective knowledge is the frame.
But what of prospective knowledge, the sense that something is not only a certainty but impending? Clive James’s poem Japanese Maple, first published in the New Yorker and reproduced in the Guardian, is more than a poem now. We know that James is dying. We can’t help but know it. The name Clive James means many things to us, but now the meaning of the name is modified. We read the poem as a formal and elegant valedictory, and since form – especially as rhyme – is an aspect of wit, we understand it as wit too, and admire it all the more for that. It is of a piece with the other productions of Clive James, intelligent, witty, skilful, highly crafted and, under the lightness, serious: deadly serious in fact.
Artists make their own valedictory farewells: some in youth approaching danger, some in the certainty of execution, some through sickness or by premonition. On the one hand we have the unique poem of Chidiock Tichborne on the night before his execution for treason at the age of 28 in 1586. It is a glittering performance that begins: “My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, / My feast of joy is but a dish of pain”. On the other, Wilfred Owen’s line “And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan” (from The Show). There is also the Hungarian poet, Miklós Radnóti, who had seen others shot in November 1944 and, correctly, foresaw his own death in the fourth of his Razglednicas: “And I could hear / A voice above me say: der springt noch auf. / Earth and dried blood mingling in my ear.”
We might remember the Robert Louis Stevenson poem from which Philip Larkin stole his own title, This Be The Verse. Nobody got fucked up in Stevenson. He ended elegiacally with “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.” Rupert Brooke wanted some part of him to be “forever England”. Keith Douglas asked to be simplified when he was dead. Emily Brontë pleaded for death itself in Death. Emily Dickinson “heard a Fly buzz” when she died. Sylvia Plath assidously courted death in Lady Lazarus, and the poem made a conscious performance of it.
Poetry retains some vestigial claim to prophecy, but is often employed for valedictory messages. Just read the verses on gravestones. Prophesying your death is one thing: writing your own valedictory is another. Mark Twain correctly forecast his death to coincide with the reappearance of Halley’s Comet, but that wasn’t in a work of literature constructed for the purpose.
Piling example on example like this trivialises the occasion of death, and Clive James’s poem is not to be trivialised. It seems to be what it is billed to be. In his last interview with Melvyn Bragg, the playwright Dennis Potter talked of wanting to finish his play Cold Lazarus, which was about being revived from death by cryonics. He did finish it.
James’s poem begins with the line “Your death, near now, is of an easy sort”. Without knowing the circumstances, the poem need not be understood as valediction. Death might be imagined at some imprecise date in the far future. But we know otherwise. His Japanese Maple calls out, in its own way, to the trees in Marvell’s A Dialogue Between Soul and Body, which ends: What but a Soul could have the wit / To build me up for Sin so fit? / So Architects do square and hew, / Green Trees that in the Forest grew. The echo passes from tree to tree by way of wit. It is a proper echo.
