3 - Hang Thinking: The Thought of Death
Summary
… But that one
…
… whose sole office was to exist - Should suddenly dissolve and cease to be Calls up the hardest questions.
('Sonnets on the Thought of Death’)THROUGH
After death we face questions, especially when no one has ever died before. When the world began, as Clough reminds us, ‘we were meant to live for ever’; it was only with the Fall, with the eating of the forbidden fruit, that we learnt to die. Well might Clough's Adam ask, ‘what is … death?’ The same question is begged as Cain, having committed the world's first murder, struggles to make sense of the motionless body that lies before him:
What? fallen? so quickly down, so easily felled,
And so completely? Why, he does not move.
Will he not stir - will he not breathe again?
…
Dead is it then?This first ever death calls up particularly hard questions, and the hardest, or harshest, is: ‘Dead is it then?’ What makes this question so harsh, so unnerving, is that it calls up reason, or deduction: this body does not move, does not stir, does not breathe … ‘Dead is it then?’ Dead is it, therefore? Faced by the world's very first corpse, Cain neither weeps nor laughs, instead he simply reasons, he draws on the resources of logic. Isobel Armstrong suggests that, in Clough, ‘reasoning is not only a procedure but a theme’ - a theme of death, it seems. To quote Clough's Adam, ‘eat we did, and so were doomed to die’; or, in the words of Dipsychus's Spirit,'therefore you … die’. The words ‘therefore’ and ‘die’ make for a terrible combination; there is something about bringing reason to bear on death that disturbs and disquiets: ‘Dead is it then?’; ‘so … we die’; ‘therefore you … die’ - each time Clough insists on reasoning death, or at least that we should know what it feels like when death is reasoned or, still worse, made reasonable. Clough, the poet whose theme is reason, does not stop reasoning in the face of death.
In Clough, mind or consciousness keeps going right up to the very instant of death, even the instant of my own death.
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- Arthur Hugh Clough , pp. 63 - 84Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2005