A Note on Caroline Vaughan's 'Death Came Twice' – David Rigsbee

Homer’s Odyssey tells us of Odysseus’ descent to the underworld in Book XI, where he meets his dead mother Anticlia and learns that she died of grief over the absence of her son. In spite of the misery of her departure, Odysseus learns a great deal about what happened in Ithaca during his two decades away. He also feels again the love of his mother, who unburdens herself, having been refreshed by a cup of blood he furnishes to animate her and give her powers of speech, but the moment is temporary, which means under the regime of unforgiving time. He makes three attempts to take her in his arms, but each time he realises that he only embraces a mist. Still, he reemerges from the land of the dead firm in the belief that he was doing the right thing and that his mother, even dead, loved him.

In the sixth book of The Aeneid, Aeneas records his journey to the underworld, where he meets with his dead father Anchises in the Elysian Fields. During the encounter, Anchises offers his son a vision of his future lineage and commends him on his quest to reestablish the Trojan line in Italy and later to become one of the founders of Rome and all that follows that.  His father, being in eternity, can see the future, which is, for the living, the extension of time into a question mark. Virgil presents Aeneas as a leader in search of approval. Before he finds his father, he encounters the deceased figure of Dido, the queen of Carthage, whose love and marriage he has rejected in order to forge on with his god-inspired mission. Dido had responded to his desertion by climbing onto her funeral pyre and impaling herself with a sword. As the hero’s ships pull out, Aeneas can see the smoke rising from the pyre but is unaware of its source. Thus he learns the consequences of his choice of duty over love and witnesses Dido’s bitter withdrawal among the other shades, glimpsing as she recedes, her glaring former husband. Despite this regret, the deep chagrin, and the histrionics of the scorned lover, Aeneas’ matters of the heart must give way to the clarion call of duty.

This is how the passage has been taught, and its dilemma has come down to us more pronounced than settled case law. And yet, how we understand the encounter and its takeaways has changed in our era. In other words, the elegy has moved to the forefront of meaningful utterance by casting off many of the cushioning conventions and illusions that sustained us in the past. I have suggested elsewhere that I take it to be the most important genre in poetry. Why would I make such a claim? Because the elegy situates itself between presence and absence and asks in what way (if any way) can language find meaning where there is no echo. In other words, it brings up the hardest questions. In our era, the elegy now serves up its paradox stripped of civic and religious baggage. We want to honour our parents, for example, but we no longer believe they can give us blessings or commendations from beyond the grave. The great Stanley Kunitz’ central theme was the loss of his father by suicide when he was four. In his landmark poem, 'Father and Son', we see the latter as he bounds through the woods—his selva oscura—to the marsh, where he summons his dead father from the water in which he drowned, desperate for guidance, love, and acknowledgement, only to find that "Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me/the white ignorant hollow of his face".

The elegy has now evolved into a starker version in which there is no expectation that the dead will somehow appear to bless us as we go on in our lives, and even if they should (or could), such a thing would be met with instinctive disbelief. Caroline Hickman Vaughan, praised for her captivating photographic work, which includes numerous portraits of her father before his death, writes in the remarkable, haunting elegy 'Death Came Twice' of a dreamlike encounter in which her father, now deceased, appears in his own hearse and addresses her. The poem opens deliberately and matter-of-factly, "I never said goodbye to my father", which establishes the strictly confessional mode that will be enlarged by the dreamscape that follows, that is, "my childhood home". We are in one of those conditions where both time and place have lost their usual dimensions, where "I grasped his hand, transporting him to my house/miles away, yet we only took twelve steps". If time and space go haywire, as they can in dreams, logic itself falls apart. There is only the supremacy of the image, in Vaughan’s poem, a tender one, powered by memory and wish-fulfilment:

It was hot for September. Windows down,
father was in back eating petit fours, pink ones,
clouded in the aroma of sweet, sweet sugar.
I stuck my head in the window.
Are they good, Dad? I asked.
He’d always had a sweet tooth.

The mystery of his condition, as if he is in some kind of bardo—and beyond the mystery of how he came to appear in the first place, becomes vivid in the contrast between violence and gentleness that Vaughan offers:

Sun bit the windshield,
slicing through him like a knife.
I saw the door handle on the other side.
Translucent light breathed him
the way moon slides through clouds.

The father emerges from the car, and his daughter helps him, his head bobbing, into the house. They both know he belongs there, and she puts him to bed, where she feels the warmth of his hand. It’s as if in putting him on his deathbed, he is at his most poignantly human ("I need to rest. I’m tired./Where I’m going there will be no more little pink cakes."), having left the hearse where he was sliced by sunlight. Like Odysseus with his mother, the daughter forces the issue by reaching to embrace him, coming up with only the comforter in her arms. He is now nothing, defying any attempt at being revived (there is nothing to revive).  

Someone once said that the loveliest word in the English language is “stay". This poem reminded me of that, and of the wistful question that John Ashbery made when he wrote, "What is there to do but stay?/ And that we cannot do". Vaughan’s poem gives us a brilliant example of the elegy’s power to reckon with the beloved dead and to wring meaning from the air. My mentor, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, in referencing W. H. Auden, remarked that "if time worships language, then language is greater than time". It gives us a loophole to escape the threat of oblivion. Mallarmé famously wrote that "everything exists to wind up in a book". You may find that cold comfort, but Caroline Vaughan doesn’t. Neither do I. It was in this way that the gods themselves survived.

This poem, and its graceful translation, makes a vivid and fitting contribution to Vo(i)ces II, itself a gem of a collection of new voices, original and translated. Readers will be dazzled by the reach of this volume. 

—David Rigsbee 

David Rigsbee

 

David Rigsbee is author of over 20 books in poetry, non-fiction, translation and criticism. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals, including The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review,The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Southern Review and Vogue. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Pushcart Prize, two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well an Award from the Academy of American Poets. Currently he works as a manuscript consultant and book reviewer. His latest book is a translation of Dante’s Paradiso (2023).  His Watchman in the Knife Factory:  New and Selected Poems is forthcoming in 2024.

 

A graduate of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill as a Morehead Scholar (B.A. in English and Russian—summa cum laude), he attended the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins (M.A.), Hollins University (M.A.L.S. in philosophy), and the University of Virginia (Ph.D. in English). He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.