By Norman Fried —

Modern poetry has often found a critical muse in the concept of death. In words apocryphal or mundane, spiritual or skeptical, modern poets have used their art as a means to describe their terse and terminal views of the inevitable.

Wallace Stevens, perhaps one of the most skeptical of modern poets, considered death as a “termination” or cessation? of all life energy,?an “absolute without memorial.” We see this in Steven’s famous but dark poem, “Madame Le Fleurie,” in which death is likened to a “waiting parent,” ready to devour us beneath her dew. William Carlos Williams is also known for his clinical depictions of the dying as a “godforsaken curio” or a “thing ” which love can not touch.

These words stand in stark contrast to the notorious “wager” proposed by Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher who stated: “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is…. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”

What, then, can the serious writings of many of our most famous modern poets offer us with regard to the problems of loss and grief? Religious scripture offers promise of transcendence and redemption. Children’s folktales implicate magic and personal wishes as the archetype for healing and restored health. Mystics and mediums pre-suppose a transition from the physical to a spiritual realm. But modern poetry often leaves us struggling to find a vision of death as more than, as British poet Philip Larken stated in the 1970s, “total emptiness for ever.”

Pascal had it right with his notorious “wager.” Many who are nearing death, or who are facing the imminent and certain loss of a loved one, find themselves drawn to a belief in a redemptive divinity or mystical force for solace and comfort. For it is important to remember that, just as Pascal challenged three centuries ago, there is longing in each and every one of us to “gain all” in the process of our own inevitable dying.

The words of John Donne from The Oxford Book of Death are more helpful when he proclaims: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally.” For as the dying and their loved ones face the inevitable pain that lies ahead, the tersely optimistic final sentence of John Donne’s sonnet offers, perhaps, the greatest solace of all:

“Death…thou shalt die.”

Reach Dr. Norman Fried through his website, www.normanfried.com