9/11 Poetry & Whitman

One of the poems I felt was able to touch on collective loss similarly to Whitman was the poem "Photograph" by Wilslawa Szymborska. This poem focused on the way in which loss becomes trapped like a photograph in our memory saying, "The photograph halted them in life, / and now keeps them / above the earth toward the earth." Like Whitman, there is this emphasis on the link between the sky and the ground. This line is making an obvious reference to the the towers falling towards earth put also seems to allude to the lost lives existing now above the earth (in the heavens) looking down on the ground of earth.

The poem ends with, "I can do only two things for them- / describe this flight / and not add a last line." This presents a similar struggle that Whitman has with coping with loss. Whitman writes, "O how shall i warble myself for the dead one there I loved? / And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone? / And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him, I love?" It is a search for the appropriate gesture and language to remember a loss-the collective loss of thousands of people or the individual loss of one person. What is the right way to artistically represent a loss for the masses through a media like poetry? Especially because Whitman's idea of poetry was that it was only poetry if it was going to be read by a mass audience so how does one discuss such a serious topic in this matter? I think his poem is a narrative investigation of this question.

The conclusion both of these poets seems to come to is that the poem must not end in that the poem itself is the memory of the loss. So that by not adding the last line, that memory will be immortalized. Whitman says that, "I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring" so that the act of mourning is like the seasons-no matter how far off they seem they always return and always exist.

Both these poems speak to dealing with loss, however, Whitman is much more thorough in his poem. He seems really concerned with the natural way to express loss because although these feelings come on there own, "naturally", they never feel natural-loss always has a very uneasy and confusing twist to it. So Whitman is in search of "What shall my perfume be for the grave of him, I love?... These and with these and the breath of my chant, I'll perfume the grave of him I love."