Her final Summer was it—

Her final Summer was it—
And yet We guessed it not—
If tenderer industriousness
Pervaded Her, We thought

A further force of life
Developed from within—
When Death lit all the shortness up
It made the hurry plain—

We wondered at our blindness
When nothing was to see
But Her Carrara Guide post—
At Our Stupidity—

When duller than our dullness
The Busy Darling lay
So busy was she—finishing—
So leisurely—were We—


     -Fr847, J795, Fascicle 38, 1864

I asked the poet Juliana Spahr if she would care to comment on this poem as a guest blogger for Prowling Bee and she graciously said yes. I thought of Juliana when I read this poem because of the line "If tenderer industriousness." It reminded me of her internet handle, "King Tender." You can check out some of Spahr's poems on the Poetry Foundation website. She has several terrific books available too. I recommend them all. 

Thank you, Juliana, for this Carrara Guide post. 

       -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Here's Juliana's post on Fr846:

This is an elegy of sorts. Many elegies, as they remember the dead, move from lament to consolation. But this poem instead focuses on the narrator’s inability to recognize the death that was to come. Still an elegy, just one that is about the human tendency to deny or overlook death.

The first stanza is about how no one realized it was “her final Summer.” It uses anastrophe to express this delayed recognition. “Her final Summer” arriving before the verb that calls it into being. The guess of “We guessed” showing up before its negation. The “Tender industriousness” before she was “Pervaded.” And if the first stanza is considered in isolation, then it looks like “We thought” is possibly about the “tenderer industriousness” that “Pervaded Her,” yet another anastrophe.

Then the second stanza breaks this anastrophe as it describes the “further force of life” that death exposed. Death becomes a metaphor, a source of light that reveals the truth, one that makes “the hurry plain,” or clearly exposes.

The third stanza has the bereaved examining their blindness now that death has arrived and shed some light on the whole situation. In the third line of this stanza there is another metaphor of sorts. Dickson calls the tombstone a “Carrara Guide post.”

Metaphors open up poems, require readers to make some connections on their own. They delight most when they combine two things to make a third thing. Here, Carrara is combined with Guide to describe post. And this post, or tombstone, reminds us of our stupidity, makes clear what we would not see before.

This one also opens up the poem’s myopic attention. Suddenly, a location: Carrara. Marble has been excavated from Carrara, Italy for thousands of years. The Pantheon is made from Carrara marble. Michelangelo’s David and the Pieta also. Carrara marble is prized for being white, fine-grained, easily polished, bright in other words. Soft too, so soft that acid rain dissolves it. It is rarely used for ordinary tombstones, especially in the US. Granite, weather-resistant, durable, dull gray is more common. So here, another moment of light made by death. Then, a “Guide”... The capitalization allows it to be a title, as in describing a possible “Guidebook to Carrara.” This imaginary book might describe how to tour the quarries, might illuminate the anarchist history of the area, might highlight the difficult and dangerous labor of working in the quarries. This history is, of course, not in the poem. But it is there as a sort of ghost.

The last stanza has “the Busy Darling” lying in state. And reminds that she worked all summer, while we all relaxed. It is possible to read that last line--“So leisurely—were We—”--as yet another anastrophe. But it also makes sense to read it as aposiopesis, a thought left incomplete, that implies that we have so much guilt about enjoying our summer that to articulate its pleasures would be a violation. Traditional elegies move toward acceptance. This one stays suspended in guilt, refuses to articulate the leisures of summer to pursue an honesty about the disorientating moment when death is arriving and we are refusing to see it.

I had a friend recently die. They seemed to know they were going to die and kept saying goodbye and I kept telling them that while we all die, they were far from death. I kept insisting that we had much time left to really say goodbye, we did not need to do it that day. I am not sure what I would have done differently if I had been willing to admit that they might die. I have wrestled with how unfathomable I have found the death of a friend.

My blindness. My stupidity. This poem describes these things. But it does not tell us what to do with them. It neither absolves nor condemns. Instead, it describes.

      -Juliana Spahr