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In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line.
Dear Poets,
What do you do when the person you thought would be your best friend forever and ever and ever no longer feels the same way? Or perhaps never even did? Is it just time to move on? What do you when you've promised yourself, and her, that you would love her forever and ever, no matter what? Was that a ridiculous promise?
Thank you,
Lost
Dear Lost,
I’m sorry that you’re experiencing this heartbreak. It is both an exquisiteness and a challenge that friendship is not governed by the regulation of other relationships. Friendship is not afforded the same social (or legal) recognition as blood ties or romantic partnerships. How we love our friends has few rules, and that means we get to be gorgeously creative with that love. It also means that how we work through conflict—how and if and when friendships end—has few models. In my experience, this confusion has made the end of close friendships all the more painful. For you, "Poem" by Langston Hughes, which cuts through the haze to say it plain:
I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began—
I loved my friend.
I memorized this poem the first time I read it. It lives in my body as completely as heartbreak. Its simplicity feels incontrovertible: "I loved my friend / He went away from me." Its title—simply, "Poem"—reminds me how pain spreads. What other story, in this moment of heartbreak, could a poem tell? The tiny form of this poem met the formlessness of my grief—it offered me something to hold so that I was less held by my own hurt. I hope it offers you some relief, too.
You promised to be her friend forever. Sometimes forever isn’t a measure of time. When you made that forever-promise, you lived in a moment so full it offered you a perch to glimpse the rest of your lives. That is a gift. But, as James Baldwin writes: "For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever…" Things change. Change is a condition of loss. It is also a condition of growth. You deserve to pour into those who would pour into you, to carry forward your capacity to love towards those who will love you well back.
—CS
Poets,
I need a poem for courage. I have ambitions to become a great artist, but I am afraid that my art will not be well-received. The thought of that mortally wounds me and sometimes prevents me from putting my work out there. I have an intense fear of failure, and I know I need to get over that in order to get anywhere. Do you have a poem that speaks to overcoming your deepest fears and being brave enough to bare your vulnerable side to the world?
Sincerely,
Fearing Failure
Dear Fearing Failure,
I do have a poem I’d like to share with you. It’s not a poem of courage, but it is a poem of purpose. Elizabeth Alexander—who, as well as being a magnificent poet, was also my beloved professor—taught me that fear can be a form of ego because, like hubris or arrogance, fear amplifies the size of the self. It puts the self between the self and the task at hand. Fear diminishes focus. For you, Elizabeth Alexander’s "Ars Poetica #100: I Believe":
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?
I love the ars poetica—a poem that makes a claim about what poetry does—because it dares to articulate its purpose, which is to say: it risks failure. But failure focuses on the self. Purpose, on the other hand, reminds you that your art connects you to something greater. With purpose, the work, not the self, is the site of your attention.
—CS
Dear Poets,
Life has gone astray and I am considering faith again in its many forms. I identify as nonbinary, and I'm having trouble reconciling the validity of any binary. I feel a reluctance to believe in something because it is inherently good or bad, but I want to have faith in something. How do you define faith? Can you point me to a faith-defining poem?
Sincerely,
Seeker
Dear Seeker,
If we understand something to be only good or only bad—only one thing and definitively not that other thing—our belief in that thing will quickly crumble. Or, more dangerously, we will wish to harm anything that threatens to expose the binary’s fallacy. A stable faith can’t be found in evangelical certainty. Faith is what steadies you to move into the unknown.
doubt keeps a kind
of faith, is belief
without a word
for what
it knows—plenty
for what we don’t
I love this conception of faith as loyalty to doubt, this reminder of the entanglement between believing and not knowing.
Poetry is faith work for me, a practice of being with the unknown. As C. D. Wright writes: "[Poetry postulates] an inquiry extended along the lengths of the lines of knowing and beyond the tips of the known." In poems, the end of each line casts me into space. When I come back to meaning, I come back slightly estranged from what I knew before, open(ed) to another way. The nonbinary—the thing that misaligns you from uncomplicated belief—may be precisely what leads you to wonder. Young writes:
at night I count
not the stars
but the dark
And I think here is one definition of faith: that disjuncture between our tools for understanding and that which we give our attention. Attention is faith’s form. It grants that there might be something worthy there.
You already have faith. Your seeking is its trace. What you need now is a ritual—reading, writing, running, drawing, cooking—that can give form to it and move you deeper into the seeking you’ve already begun.
—CS
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by William Shakespeare
by William Shakespeare
• Themes
• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Speaker
• Setting
• Context
• Resources
• Themes
• Line-by-Line
Explanations
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary &
References
• Form, Meter, &
Rhyme Scheme
• Speaker
• Setting
• Context
• Resources
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Get the entire guide to "Sonnet 71: No longer mourn for me when I am dead" as a printable PDF.
The Full Text of "Sonnet 71: No longer mourn for me when I am dead"
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.
The Full Text of "Sonnet 71: No longer mourn for me when I am dead"
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Apostrophe
Alliteration
What do you see, nurses, what do you see?
Are you thinking, when you look at me —
A crabby old woman, not very wise,
Uncertain of habit, with far-away eyes,
Who dribbles her food and makes no reply,
When you say in a loud voice — “I do wish you'd try.”
Who seems not to notice the things that you do,
And forever is losing a stocking or shoe,
Who unresisting or not, lets you do as you will,
With bathing and feeding, the long day to fill.
Is that what you're thinking, is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, nurse, you're looking at ME…
I'll tell you who I am, as I sit here so still;
As I rise at your bidding, as I eat at your will.
I'm a small child of ten with a father and mother,
Brothers and sisters, who love one another,
A young girl of sixteen with wings on her feet.
Dreaming that soon now a lover she'll meet;
A bride soon at twenty — my heart gives a leap,
Remembering the vows that I promised to keep;
At twenty-five now I have young of my own,
Who need me to build a secure, happy home;
A woman of thirty, my young now grow fast,
Bound to each other with ties that should last;
At forty, my young sons have grown and are gone,
But my man's beside me to see I don't mourn;
At fifty once more babies play 'round my knee,
Again we know children, my loved one and me.
Dark days are upon me, my husband is dead,
I look at the future, I shudder with dread,
For my young are all rearing young of their own,
And I think of the years and the love that I've known;
I'm an old woman now and nature is cruel —
‘Tis her jest to make old age look like a fool.
The body is crumbled, grace and vigor depart,
There is now a stone where once I had a heart,
But inside this old carcass a young girl still dwells,
And now and again my battered heart swells.
I remember the joys, I remember the pain,
And I'm loving and living life over again,
I think of the years, all too few — gone too fast,
And accept the stark fact that nothing can last —
So I open your eyes, nurses, open and see,
Not a crabby old woman, look closer, nurses — see ME!
This poem was found among the possessions of an elderly lady who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital. No information is available concerning her — who she was or when she died. Reprinted from the “Assessment and Alternatives Help Guide” prepared by the Colorado Foundation for Medical Care.