Bright Knots of Apparitions: Meeting the Dead in Modern Poetry

I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back and say yes, house, bridge, river, hair, no, maybe, never, forever. Mary Ruefle1 ON BEING ASKED TO GIVE this year’s F. W. Bateson lecture, I initially felt paralysed, remembering the editorial flair and literary acumen of the ‘scholar-critic’ who founded Essays in Criticism and the names of the many luminaries who have given it before me. At a loss for an appropriate topic, what came to mind were the words of Emily Dickinson in my title: ‘Bright Knots of Apparitions’. The poem this comes from – ‘Of nearness to her sundered Things’ – has haunted me for many years and is about haunting by the dead. I want to use it as a launch-pad for thinking about apparitional encounters with the dead in modern poetry, and what they tell us about our relationship to mortality and to ideas about the afterlife, which have always haunted poetry. I think of these as ‘mortal lyrics’, poems confronting the finitude of life but lit up by numinous apprehensions of death and the dead. ‘So this is what an afterlife can come to’, Seamus Heaney says in a poem to the dead painter Colin Middleton framed by Dante’s and Plato’s visions of life after death, ‘A cloud-boil of grey weather on the wall / Like murky crystal’ (he’s referring to a painting by Middleton called Loughanure which he owned).2 Heaney’s ‘Murky crystal’ and Dickinson’s ‘Bright Knots of Apparitions’ are luminous materialisations of ‘sundered things’, lost people and selves viewed in the wake of what Heaney, writing to Ted Hughes from Santiago in 1996, called ‘the huge collapse that has taken place at the centre of the Christian thing’.3