Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved:
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.
(lines 5–8)
These objects—table, silver, glass—have an almost sacramental value to the mourner. The challenge is accepting that someone “beautiful and wise” (line 12) is no more and there remain only the objects that the person touched.
Similarly, Edna St. Vincent Millay suggests in “Sonnet II” (1917) that while there is no respite from the grief of losing a loved one to death, memories are embodied in the physical places and feelings that the speaker and the deceased experienced together:
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!
(lines 9–14)
Like Aiken, Millay embeds memories in objects and places, but ultimately she realizes that they are truly within the bereaved. Yet Millay also wrestles with the possibility of oblivion. In “Elegy Before Death” (1921) she anticipates the death and erasure of a loved one, noting: “Spring will not ail nor autumn falter;/Nothing will know that you are gone” (lines 9–10). Millay is ambivalent about the way the natural world will continue with little regard for a human loss. However, she indicates that to the speaker some of the beauty will be gone from the world—“Only the light from common water,/Only the grace from simple stone!” (lines 19–20). While the cycles of nature are not paused by this death, life is no longer as meaningful. Millay here codes memory as an absence: that in no longer experiencing what was experienced before (the enhanced beauty of the world), that sensation of increased emptiness is a form of memory. Similarly to “Elegy before Death,” “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1918) by Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) suggests that even humanity could be forgotten; she describes “robins” (line 5) and how
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly[.]
(lines 7–10)
The fear of oblivion is connected with the war.
Modernists also attempted to defy or deny death. In “Dirge without Music” (1928) Millay writes: “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground” (line 1). Seemingly, recognizing the inevitability of death contradicts her refusal to be “resigned.” Samuel argues that “all of the major historical works dedicated to the subject [of death] argue in some manner that denial of death is an important dimension of the twentieth-century American experience” (2013, p. xi). For the Puritans, God had ultimate power over death and people were expected to treat death as a divine mandate; even in the nineteenth century, acceptance of death was viewed as a sign of piety, but modernists were openly defiant. Refusing to forget seems to be a defiant act as well, albeit one that is ultimately futile because memory is imperfect. Millay also writes in “Dirge without Music,” “A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost” (line 8). Samuel argues that “the notion of one day disappearing is contrary to many of [America’s] defining cultural values,” and in particular “The rise of the self has made it increasingly difficult to acknowledge the fact that our individual selves will no longer exist” (2013, p. x), a fear reflecting the shift away from the Puritan self-abnegation that encouraged consecration of one’s life to God.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) calls to mind both the war and the great influenza pandemic and depicts fear of death. The horror of death in the poem is heightened by the sheer number of dead: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many” (lines 62–63). The image of dust in the poem suggests the fear of oblivion in the promise to “show you fear in a handful of dust” (line 30). We might characterize fear of death as a particular hallmark of the modern era. Death cannot be controlled or mastered; it cannot be subdued by reason.
Modern poetry’s troubling images of rebirth reflected a contested boundary between life and death as well as attempted denial. The imagery of The Waste Land marks anxiety about manner of death and burial as well as a lack of resolution and the recurrence of troubled memories. The speaker in the first part of The Waste Land asks someone he recognizes among the dead “‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (1922, lines 71–72). The grotesque crowd of dead walking across London Bridge are not resting peacefully. The image of flowers growing from the ground (where the bodies are buried) also appears at the start of the poem: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land” (lines 1–2). The imagery parallels interest in immortality in the interwar period. Elizabeth Outka argues that the popularity of spiritualism in the United States surged in these years due to the pandemic as well as the war because both resulted in the loss of many lives as well as poor conditions for death and burial (2020, pp. 202–203).12 She also argues that spiritualism was “about exploring the threshold between the living and the dead” (2020, p. 204). Samuel notes that scientists and doctors were also exploring this threshold: cloning research seemed to offer ways of maintaining life as some scientists proposed that “should a fatal disease or injury not come one’s way, we could potentially live forever” and the new medical understanding that the heart could beat when the person appeared dead—and a person could be sometimes revived even with no heartbeat—caused confusion, optimism, and also anxiety about how the moment of death ought to be defined (2013, pp. 18–19).
Memory in the period after World War I is also a theme of Carl Sandburg’s “Grass” (1918). Like The Waste Land, the poem alludes to the bodies of war: “Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo./Shovel them under and let me work—/I am the grass; I cover all” (lines 1–3). A tension between memory and forgetting exists as the threat of something below the ground which threatens to either break out or be covered. The grass’s covering of the horrors of war as part of a societal mourning process of moving on is simultaneously comforting and threatening, as forgetting dulls the sharp pain of war—yet the bodies are still there, nonetheless. Sandburg also develops the theme of memory in “Under the Harvest Moon” (1916), depicting “Death, the gray mocker” (line 5) “As a beautiful friend/Who remembers” (lines 7–8).
“By The Road to the Contagious Hospital” in Spring and All (1923) by William Carlos Williams appears to respond to some of the imagery of The Waste Land. Plants that seem dead come back to life:
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—
(1923, pp. 12–13, lines 14–19)
Despite the overriding fixation upon (final, total) death, and an ultimate failure to find a satisfying source of comfort in grief, modern poetry—people in the modern era—were reticent to resign themselves to the idea that this life was all there is; instead, that idea prompted severe grief and denial. The poem’s images of rebirth are uncertain yet undeniable. As Williams notes in his prose that begins the volume, “The