Mother Goose in Purgatory

Keston Sutherland’s Meditations, the most extraordinary volume of English poetry in recent memory, presents unique challenges to the reviewer. It is not so much the wild shifts in tone and mood – from the pulverisingly sad to the weepingly funny, from the mock-pedantic to the shockingly intimate, from the sublime to the vulgar and back again, by way of the bizarre, the manic, and the ecstatic – as it is the feeling that what it is all ‘about’ should not be prematurely bruited by the critic. Although the book is a deeply personal meditation on a recent loss in the life of the poet, the final crisis of a lifetime of agonised struggle, and so counts in some way as a memoir, it could not be further removed from the baleful jargon of immediacy recently anatomised by Anna Kornbluh – against which it has been painstakingly indemnified by the protocols of form (you cannot write ‘meditation’ without writing ‘mediation’). 

It therefore requires of the reviewer a perplexing discretion, since it is as much ‘about’ the layers of mediation, the systemic blockage and prevarication laboriously sedimented around its central trauma, as it is ‘about’ that emergency itself. But that the entire undertaking – all 54 meditations over 184 pages of densely-packed slabs of unlineated poesy – proceeds from that central wound is equally undeniable and makes for some delicate decisions about what to feature in a critical overview, and when. We need to move crab-wise into the pain. 

The first time the word ‘mother’ appears in Meditations is in a sudden anecdotal flash: ‘you have been hunting for your mother’s empty vodka bottles on the brink of psychosis because you need them to thrust in her face to make the abhorrent pain of being lied to go away every night’. This retroactively makes some sense of the hysteria about objects and the void – about the questionable ontology of ‘felt, a bee, squill, swaps, nylon, and sundry items, such as basin traps, keys, thoughts, spirals, volatility futures, lint, or eyes’ – to which the reader has just been subject. Because if the bottles are there, if they exist, then it is possible to say: there is truth,and you are lying; or, ‘One day you’ll understand that I was right’. But if they are not there, if the bottles are merely ‘unthings’ synthesised by the imagination out of scraps and shadows, then ‘voydnesse’ threatens to swallow all. The question of the mother’s things, her objects, good or bad, and of the Thing of the Mother herself, lies at the foundation of the Meditations’ frequent epistemo-ontological ruminations.  

Poetic utterance may square the circle: ‘O world-mothering air’, Sutherland quotes Hopkins. From the air, the breath of poetry springs everything, and nothing, reality and dream, utopia and nightmare, vision and death. Teeming with animals, dripping with dream-stuff, oozing architecture and bodies, the air (an older word for song) is also that into which all things must disappear in the great final sigh of death. Sometimes, ‘in Labriola’s memorable phrase, the air is made more fit to be breathed’. But the ‘air, all of it theoretically still breathable’, is itself a ‘light and nimble body’ wanting only to ascend and disappear into the void of empty space. What keeps it down here with us, passing in and out of ‘The heaving lungs, that drink th’aerial flood’ (a line Sutherland borrows from Solyman Brown’s 1833 ‘Dentologia’), is love. Another of Sutherland’s sources, Cambridge Platonist Nathaniel Culverwell teaches us that ‘Air naturally goes up, but because it doesn’t want us to die, it stays down here so we can breathe it’. O world-mothering air, shielding us from the vacuum, inspiring us with soul, breath, sentence, and generations of song. Until, with all the acceleration our mode of production can muster, there comes at last ‘the annihilation of mother earth’ herself. 

In the world-mothering air, there is always room for one more thing. In addition to the catalogue of ‘sundry items’, ‘[s]oon there will also be geese, clamouring to be finger-painted’. Geese populate the Meditations with a strange ambivalence. When they first take flight in the poem, they do so in a recapitulation of a Persian proverb, in which a pair of geese lift ‘[a] tortoise hanging from the middle of the plank’ with its beak into the sky. Moved by pride, the tortoise cries out to be observed; and, losing his grip, he ‘fell out of the sky, and landed on a cliff, where he shattered into thousands of pieces’. It is an Icarian lesson the poet himself is advised to learn as he flies in a dream vision: ‘I felt confident enough to try calling down to the people on the ground below, and I cried out for them to watch me. I appeared in the sky, with great, shining wings outspread, and told the people I had brought them news’. Silly goose. Far better to observe in wonder from the ground: ‘Minerva’s owl never flies. […] But the goose flies, in loops, to our delight, and looks away, and shuts its eyes, and counts’. So, mothers, and geese. 

Though it had been kicking around for a century or more, the character of Mother Goose was first given published form by Charles Perrault in 1697 in Contes de ma mère l'Oye (‘Stories of Mother Goose’), which included well-known fairy tales such as ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, and ‘Cinderella’. The collection was sold to parents to read to their children in a daily ritual of pleasurable didacticism, each tale culminating in a strongly rhymed moralité. A century later, John Newbery’s English collection of nursery rhymes, Mother Goose’s Melody, or Sonnets for the cradle forever clinched the relationship between Mother Goose and Anglophone children’s verse, to the point where today the former is effectively a synecdoche for the latter. ‘Rhyme was poetry to you’, Sutherland writes to his own mother. ‘And because rhyme was poetry, it simplified the world, to make it fit its scheme.’ The poet gently implores her, ‘show me how to rhyme like you do, matching words like rhyme and time, in poetry that’s not long for this world, obviously’. That poetry is not long for this world is a throughline of the Meditations, for reasons that are historical, social, and genetic. 

As Friedrich Kittler has observed, ‘[a]round 1800 a new type of book began to appear, one that delegated to mothers first the physical and mental education of their children, then their alphabetization’. The book that wove those lessons into a poetic pedagogy was Mother Goose Rhymes. From it tumbled the century and a half of the Poem, mothered by nursery airs, the bodies of women, the organic communication of affect. Meanwhile, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi has written about ‘the spreading psychopathology of the generations that have learnt more words from a machine than from their mother [since the 1970s]’ – a psychopathology stemming from ‘the disappearance of the mother and the consequent break between the learning of language and affectivity’. Hold the thought of the disappearance of the mother. The interregnum between the closing of the neo-classical age and our own techno-capitalism turned out to be the high-water mark for the Age of Poetry, a boon of mothers to sons. And now it is over, and perhaps the only remaining course is ‘to leave the poetry alone and let the silence in before it, too, is too late, and turns meaningful, for good’. 

Where are the poets’ mothers in poetry? Not the sickly, idealised, sentimental ciphers of the late Romantics, but the real, breathing, working women who nurtured and grew the talent? The mother that Sutherland addresses in these simple, internally rhyming sing-song pentameters: 

The continuity between language acquisition, intimate maternal touching, and poetic utterance lights up in a circuit of unbreakable affect. ‘I wish we could have shared some poetry,’ he continues, logically. It is the deepest wish of the Meditations, couched in the past unreal conditional tense: a meeting of minds and bodies on the commons of language, where all debts are cancelled and guilts absolved. Ann and Jane Taylor, quoted in this text, wrote fondly of their mother; John Greenleaf Whittier, Edgar Allan Poe, Christina Rossetti, Rudyard Kipling, Lola Ridge, all tossed off ‘Mother poems’ in various accents of mawkish nostalgia. But only the two great mama’s boys of twentieth-century poetry managed to produce work not altogether insupportable: Philip Larkin and Pier Paulo Pasolini. To Larkin, Sutherland obviously owes nothing; with Pasolini, he shares a profound duty to ‘love the mother’s flesh in the son’ (as Pasolini puts it in ‘Saluto e augurio’) and a tortured cry to the maternal figure: ‘I beg you, oh, I beg you: don’t wish for death’ (‘Supplica a mia madre’). 

Here at last we touch the proximate cause and primum mobile of the Meditations: the suicide of the poet’s mother, around which the text spirals in massively energetic sequences of avoidance and approach: ‘The house of fiction has in short not one more try to carve truth’s window out of someone’s head, not mine, admittedly, for once and all, or else the masquerade may never end of you committing suicide to end pain’. But try and try again the house surely does (‘I am the house. And I am the head’), spinning out vast comic riffs and nightmarish fever-dreams, to distract from and illuminate what then insists on being spoken anyway, in naked accents unprecedented in Sutherland’s work. ‘Tearing my hair out trying to be alive and have my own body’, the poet cannot shake the final scene that sucks him back into hers: ‘I stood and watched you die before my eyes’. World-mothering air, underwritten by grim pentameter-periods:  

Back, always, to breath: ‘Annihilation was the air you breathed’; intubated, ‘a tube as thick as your finger inserted down your throat and into your lung’, finally the mother’s mouth stops breathing altogether, ‘the air is switched off […] There is no air. […] I watch the air go in and you go out’. Insufflation, suffocation. Airy nothings. 

The figure of Mother Goose was the last of three services rendered by the goose to English poesy. The second was its stalwart defence of the commons. The anonymous four-stanza ballad, ‘The Goose and the Common’, first published in 1821 but dating back centuries, opens:

Sutherland’s new work locates an echo of this doggerel in a 1650 story about a commoner in the stocks appealing to the King against a landlord’s greed: ‘I beseech your Majesty be Judge, Who is the greater Thief, I for stealing Geese from the Common, or Sir Thomas here for robbing the Common from the Geese?’ The goose is more of a foursquare peasant than the aristocratic swan (the English Crown has claimed all unmarked mute swans swimming in open waters throughout the country from as far back as the twelfth century), and the association is openly politicised in the folk ballad’s final couplet: ‘And geese will still a common lack / Till they go and steal it back’.  

In Meditations, Sutherland pursues a lengthy, if covert, disquisition into the consequences of five centuries of enclosure, dispossession, proletarianisation, and impoverishment among the working poor of the United Kingdom – not as a supplement to the presiding accents of personal elegy, melancholia, and grief, but precisely as their explanation. Meditations 11 and 12 introduce us to the ‘celebrated agriculturalist Arthur Young’ (1741-1820), ‘a sworn enemy of the commons’, and a suitable representative of the cruel passion of the English ruling class’s bloody campaign to strip all means of production from the unpropertied classes. As an ideologue, Young personifies the economic agency that gave birth to capitalism, the drive to accumulate via the toil of those with nothing to sell but their labour-power, and his tainted spoor is everywhere around us in ‘the Blob-like social force of interchangeability and equivalence’. The penultimate crushed metrum (see below) Sutherland addresses to his mother includes the haunting lines: 

Access to the commons has been prohibited for so long that only the instinctual body dimly remembers their promise. Love is all that remains of Shakespeare’s ‘sweets grown common’ (Sonnet 102), all now hoarded by a kleptocratic elite, and, with no social medium left through which to propagate, it will burn your body to cinders: ‘I want more love than I know what to do with. I want love to burn’. 

The poet’s mother is Arthur Young’s bitter antagonist, a worn relic of the sick world he has fathered. In life she is a ‘cleaning lady’, a four-legged creature: ‘One life, on all fours’, locked into work that is the infernal residue of ‘the ancient domestic slaves’ amidst large-scale industrial forms (‘What an elevating consequence of the capitalist exploitation of machinery!’ as Marx wryly observed of the burgeoning servant class). ‘You lived in poverty’, her bereaved son declares, a multidimensional, multigenerational, inescapable poverty, ringed round with unpayable debts, unscrupulous recovery agents, brutality, malice, and the usual pitiless litany of working-class women’s lives:

Can a life be truly lived when it earns its subsistence as ‘a trainee housekeeping team member on nights and early mornings in the same week at a Premier Inn thirty odd miles away, in your late sixties, with back problems, chronic arthritis, neuralgia and undiagnosed PTSD’? Get real. ‘[Y]ou gave your life away for free. The vile rich bled you dry and caged you’. Over and again, Sutherland maps out his mother’s working life as a pitiless round of menial labour without the relief of any residual commons where custom and community might be practiced. Like others of her class, she has not even a label to feel proud about. ‘You did work you hated. […] You weren’t even supposed to call yourself a proletarian any more’.  

What kind of immortality is afforded the atheist poor, who scorn God – ‘you never gave thanks to God, never went to church, lied, cheated, envied, hated, stole, didn’t pray, couldn’t be bothered’ – and despise pity? What kind of posthumous commotion (literally, a struggle over the commons) might be mounted with this woman’s redoubtable figura, her prodigious animosity, mendacity, and despair, and with the softness of her cheek, her uncontrollable laughter at The Fall’s ‘Cary Grant’s Wedding’, and her proud descent from other working-class women – such that she, too, might mount the sky?

The answer must concern the first and most vital of the goose’s contributions to poetry: its moulted primary flight feathers, sharpened to quills, from which streamed the inked words that made modern Western European literature. The principal writing instrument from the sixth to the nineteenth century, the goose quill was finally displaced by the mass-produced metal pen from 1822, but not before its unique compatibility with velum and parchment underwrote a vast, Europe-wide manuscript culture and the intellectual ferment of multiple renaissances, reformations, and revolutions.  

In the Meditations, we discover an incredibly rich palimpsest of textual traces first inscribed with quill and ink, evidence of the unending human tasks of (a) cataloguing, classifying, and naming the contents of the cosmos, and (b) ‘scouring reality for unthings whose meanings don’t exist’ – or, empiricism and speculation. Poetry finds itself pinioned between these dual forces, but leaning dangerously toward ‘the old forbidden syntheses of brainsick, indigestible unthings’, namely, the metaphysical – which is to say, everything that is not ‘the real’. The advice of ‘the real’ is the same as it ever was: ‘it is now time to stop’, which is where the Meditations begin and where they remain stuttering. But the Meditations do not stop their wild speculations (‘Don’t worry not one word of this is true’) – not until they reach a triumphant formal crescendo the likes of which we have not seen in English poetry for centuries (more on this in the final paragraph). The task of poetic meditation is taken up with the mad industry of the Metaphysical poets, yoking thought and feeling together with the hair-raising syntax of the mock-pedant, the lay preacher, and the public transport crackpot.

Sutherland’s erasure of any distinction between ‘prose’ and ‘poetry’ is warranted by the history of the meditation form. While its oldest exponents, Martianus and Boethius, composed prosimetra, a literary form alternating between prose and verse versions of the same meditations, it is to Boece, Chaucer’s Middle English translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae – which the author wrote out with goose quill in the mid-1380s to bring its sublime consolations to the common people, a mission fully accomplished when William Caxton published it almost a century later in 1478 – that Sutherland swears his fundamental allegiance. By flattening even the verse metra into prose, Boece offers a foundation for all English meditations since, especially this one, which periodically issues shorter canzoni to round off longer sequences, very much on the model of Chaucer’s crushed metra: Meditations 4, 7, 19, 22, 31, 40, 49, and 53 suspend the prevailing interest in narrative and dialogue to privilege a super-compressed, lyric intensity able to nourish the scattered seeds of thought: 

And what can Boethian meditative consolation mean in a world where one must declare ‘How obvious it is there is no God’?  

Consolation was a powerful vector of medieval literary culture, and meditations themselves took the form of ruminations on ‘Last Things’ by attending to passages of scripture. What Sutherland has done is extend this act of meditative attention to both early English manuscript poetry, and the books that made Caxton’s print revolution palpable in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, many of them by poets: Guillaume de Guileville’s Pylgremage of the Sowle (1476/7), Chaucer’s Boece (printed 1478) and ‘Miller’s Tale’ (1478), John Lydgate’s ‘The Hors, the Shepe & the Ghoos’ (1477; there’s that goose again!), and Caxton’s translation of Aesop’s Fables (1489) and his own Doctrinal of Sapience (1489). William Hunnis’s meditational ‘The poore widowes mite’, from his Seuen Sobs of a Sorrowfull Soule for Sinne (1583), and the Preces Gertrudianae (1660s?), are placed alongside more secular literary achievements, from Thomas Elyot’s Pasquil the Playne (1533) and The Castell of Health (1541) to William Davenant’s epic Gondibert (1651). Sutherland’s Meditations thus explicitly positions itself in relation to a certain historical moment in English literature: the transitional period during which courtly and monastic manuscript culture became secularised and rendered ‘common’ by the early printing press, the scribal goose quill resurrected in the lines of movable type. Poetry was instrumental in this transition, as a mode of discourse in which the empirical and the speculative, the scientific and the metaphysical, the eye and the mouth, were held compact by a faith in the musicality of language to prepare the soul for instruction and edification.  

The poetry of this period, like so much of its devotional speech, was preoccupied with one Last Thing above others: Death. Consolation was a language game that reconciled human beings with their death, by way of reason, abstraction, vision, and faith. What we atheists have left are the sound patterns, the glyphs and signs of that ardent verbal practice, crafted into images, phrases, and cadences, in which true consolation has left its echo. Sutherland excavates these with considerable art, grafting them onto his poem like so many quivering antennae, alive to the signals of transcendence, attempting to counter Xerxes’s melancholic thought that whomsoever he sees alive today will be dead a hundred years hence. There is the blunt stoicism of the doctrine of Fortuna, as in Lydgate: ‘Harme don bi deþe no man may recure, Aȝeins whose stroke is no redempcion, Hit is full hard in fortune to assure, Here whele so ofte turnith vp and downe’. And then there is the ecstatic optimism of Culverwell: ‘the leaſt ſpark of true joy ſhall never be extinguiſht; all the floods that the Dragon can vomit out of his mouth, ſhall never be able to quench it’.

To meditate today, outside the Church, is to batten on to such language and feed from it, to roll it around in our mouths, to submit to its rhetoric and its poesis – feeling the dignity and depth of its counsel, even when the Good News it proffers seems impossibly tainted. Sutherland’s meditations are peerless acts of fealty by an historical materialist to a genre of discourse that a remorselessly secular age has flushed away with the entire edifice of metaphysics and religiosity. Marx’s famous line about the ‘heart of a heartless world and the soul of our soulless condition’ recurs frequently to the reader of the Meditations, which take the ailing pulse of ‘the new materialism of the Trump years’ and pronounce the same diagnosis Boethius did fifteen hundred years ago: vanity, avarice, greed, and ambition have corrupted the world-soul’s health, asphyxiating our great Mother, and drying up the resources of consolation, of love and duty to one another, and of respect for the miraculous. 

Obscurity is the shadow cast by death on life, and only the worst kind of vanity imagines that our immortality is vouchsafed by becoming a name, a Person, an Author. We are all of us obscure, not least our poets, who have been forgotten anyway. Meditations is deeply concerned with the disappearance of poets and of poetry from our world, and their always-already having disappeared, not because of the glorious Miltonic fame we are shamefully neglecting, but because the innumerable ‘inglorious Miltons’ buried in Thomas Gray’s country churchyard were never ‘mute’ to begin with – they have always been speaking and scribbling, and driving the engine of literature with their ceaselessly inventive demotic idioms, their great ‘barbaric yawp’ (Whitman, also mentioned here), without which poetry has no element. The relationship between poetry and obscurity is irreducible, not least because the word ‘obscure’ relates to elusive poetic meaning as much to the social substance from which it is woven. Nothing so bedevils Sutherland’s reputation as the idea that his work is excessively ‘obscure’. But this obscurity is just a way of working through all the broken ligaments that once bound poetic utterance to the commons, and of recognising that such alienation must affect the matter of poetic composition. ‘I bring it into existence precisely in order to deprive you of access to it’, he writes to his mother, who never understood a word of his poetry, and to all of us, who try and fail better.  

At one point, he speculates:  

He is thinking about his mother, her mother, hers, and every one of the billions who have lived in ‘the most egregious obscurity’. What kind of machine would finally overcome the criminal extent to which history is the story of the victors, of the Arthur Youngs and Donald Trumps, who leave their noxious traces in volumes and monoliths? One answer to that question is, of course, poetry itself. 

To meditate, to cogitate upon the signs left of a sacred consolatory promise to the obscure, on the extraordinary doctrine that ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female’, is not to succumb to religious fervour; it is to enter the future tech of poetic reclamation. In the Meditations, Sutherland does not simply mourn his mother and find a space for her recalcitrance in literary commemoration; he constellates her with others, now forgotten, whom he also obliges to exist for us. Apart from the many obscure authors he alludes to, he occasionally turns to compose side-elegies to victims of political circumstance, like the disabled Palestinian man Eyad Rawhi al-Hallaq, killed by the IDF, and the Ukrainian Bolshevik Yevgenia Bosch, who committed suicide under Stalin’s brutal leadership. The two meditations in which these deaths are registered are remarkable for their very different approaches. 

The account of al-Hallaq’s murder is provided in clipped forensic prose, explaining the bleak circumstances in which for ‘tens of thousands of […] people murdered by the state of Israel in the last few years’, ‘there will never be justice’. But alongside this record, space is yielded to Elisabeth Koolaart-Hoofman’s seventeenth-century elegy for her sister Anna (in Dutch, with translation), written ‘to console herself and affirm her faith’, and her epitaph for her friend Susanna van de Ryp, quoted in full, in an unlineated English translation: 

The meditation concludes, briefly and very movingly, ‘Goodbye Eyad Rawhi Al-Halaq. You never made it to school that morning. But you live on in our hearts’. This turn to epitaph gathers up the tender sentiments of Koolaart-Hoofman’s elegy and smites statistico-forensic anonymity with the power of a contagious affective intimacy. 

For Yevgenia Bosch, on the other hand, a much more ornate composition is afforded – an eight-and-a-half page meditation that wends its way from the congested passage between the heart and the brain, as theorised by Sir Kenelm Digby; to Lady Digby’s patronage of Ben Jonson and Van Dyck; to copious passages from the works of Margaret Cavendish, an extraordinary philosopher-poet, scientist, and playwright; to an imagined scene where Lady Digby tries to return her own brain to Yevgenia Bosch, only to be told ‘to fuck off back to the heaven she slid moulded off from’ as the great revolutionary leader draws her suicide pistol and speaks in Sutherland’s mother’s voice; to a last turn back to the mother herself, in tender accents and with the uncanny fold between her and Bosch now planted in the mind.  

These aren’t lives ‘that left no residue, or trace, or imprint, or proof of any kind that [they] existed’, but they allow the Meditations to compound the mother’s obscurity with their neglected stories and create complex friezes of forgottenness that transform, under the poet’s touch, into something properly immortal. Theognis of Megara, the first poet ever to worry over the survival of his work, is best known today for the depths of his pessimism: 

But the Meditations quote him thus: ‘You soar aloft and over land and wave / Are born triumphant on the wings I gave’. Turning on a dime, the great pessimist sings his power to transmogrify the pointless, the meaningless, the humble, the obscure, into radiant creatures, angels (or geese), born again out of the ashes of history on the wings of poetry. In the antepenultimate meditation, consulting the medieval bestiary Physiologus, Sutherland cites the splendid entry on the eagle, which like the phoenix in old age, weary and spent, flies upward to be burnt by the sun and plunges down to the bottom of a magical fountain to be reborn, healthy and sound once more.  

The immortality conferred by poetry is contingent, of course, on its public reading, on its popular currency and a broad familiarity with its iterative, citational traditions. Nothing seems so unlikely in the age of Musk and Zuckerberg. Mother Goose languishes in purgatory, wings clipped, suicidally depressed, unable to breathe, her scattered children, the poets, aghast and despondent, the world she mothered with airs laden with toxic pollutants, asphyxiating. But we must descend to ascend, and should any of her sons take up a quill in such adversity to indite the likes of Meditation 54, surely the towering achievement of Sutherland’s career and of contemporary English poetry more generally, then nothing is impossible. 

The sextuple sestina he crafts there, in retrogradatio cruciata, is a feat of such immense formal ambition it takes several readings properly to absorb: six back-to-back perfect sestinas, in lines of sprung pentameter, whose end-words (a) ‘door’, (b) ‘stairs’, (c) ‘see’, (d) ‘free’, (e) ‘eyes’, (f) ‘space’, are properly permuted: (1) a-b-c-d-e-f, (2) f-a-e-b-d-c, (3) c-f-d-a-b-e, (4) e-c-b-f-a-d, (5) d-e-a-c-f-b, (6) b-d-f-e-c-a, followed by the envoi b-e, d-c, f-a. The sequence then begins all over again across the long arc of five further sestinas whose first lines are patterned: (#2) b-e-c-f-d-a, (#3) d-b-f-a-c-e, (#4) c-a-e-b-d-f, (#5) e-f-a-d-c-b, and (#6) f-c-e-b-a-d – thirty-six stanzas exhausting the available permutations. As a climax to these mediations, this formal crescendo forges an excruciatingly moving synthesis out of the elements of the greater work, its single rhythmic pattern (whose tensions and resolutions, specific to the sestina form, are taken to the very limits of the tolerable) made all the more striking by its having been ‘crushed’ into prose. The dazzling range of references and allusions gathered together like gold-dust in this final entry (I counted 32, from Nashe, Bacon, and Shakespeare to Drexelius, Winstanley, and William Dodd, before collapsing), adds great variety and dignity to the poet’s repetitive orbits around the final trauma. The third stanza of the final sestina reads as follows: 

These last unlineated verses are the triumphant wings fashioned by our poet for his fallen mother that she, too, might ‘Ascend on wings uplifted to the sky, and shine forever’.