Carol Ann Duffy conveys the abject stoniness of grief in her poem, Mrs Lazarus. The widow of the most famous ‘miracle’ in the Christian Bible narrates her own ‘death’ after the loss of her husband, Lazarus. In Duffy’s poems, Mrs Lazarus and Demeter both share , through the deployment of the first person narrator, a violently realised sense of horror at being left behind, to live. They are literally alive, but emotionally dead.
Death kills more than the merely dead, as Duffy’s superb Medusa poem also reveals.
Duffy’s poetic details in Mrs Lazarus, focus on ‘stones’ in particular as a means of making physically apparent Mrs Lazarus’ own coldness and isolation, as well as the bleak indifference of the world to death’s monumental occurrence. Causing pain to herslef is a desperate and poignant reminder is that she is still alive and feels pain. She causes herself intense physical pain as an outlet for severe mental anguish. Control has gone. How can we pretend to control our livrs when everyone we care about can be wiped out with a blink of an eye?
Stones give powerful representation to literal and metaphorical, even psychical entombment. Think also about Duffy’s sympathetic portrayal of Medusa, surrrounded by those stony testaments to her own social , romantic suicide, and of course, King Lear’s famous declaration when Cordelia his daughter is maliciously murdered , that those left are but ‘men of stones.’ Stones do not move. They are numb to feeling, cold to the touch, yet ageless and remain when all else have perished through time. Can they ever be utterly destroyed or do they become dust and in this way, ultimately resemble us as much as we resist?
In Mrs Lazarus, therefore, widow hood is grittily imagined; the ‘d’ sounds emphasise finality, lastness palpably imagined. They are spat out, just like life itself, after someone so dear has gone forever. The repeated use of the past tense, underlines the finality and finishedness of the ‘end’ of Lazarus and by implication, Mrs Lazarus too. Indeed it could be said, that where Medusa and indeed Miss Havisham in Havisham, turns all about her to stone as she cannot bear rejection any more, Mrs Lazarus turns to the past tense to entomb herself, her way., as she cannot bear the weight and the pathos of the present tense , when the man she loved has gone. Think about the emotional poigmnancy of the tenses-both past and present. When she uses the pasttense it could be argued she is attempting to join her dead husband as she cannot bear the present without him?
But and yet, she does not die. She arranges suicide, a noose, but this escapes her and so the poem delicately charts her rebirth, her re-entry into life. Look how the poem’s breath reawakens, and perection embraces delicate details of life.
The tentative bravery of Mrs Lazarus seals our sympathy. She is a strong, brave, loyal soul. She models survival, after modelling the devastation of grief and is just beginning to thrive when horror of horrors, the famous miracle takes place! Not so much a miracle in Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, but a horrible surprise; a sort of macabre, gothic joke accompanied by voyeuristic neighbours bent on prurient pleasure. Even the resurrected Lazarus himself, finds his return terrifying and is repulsed by his abject condition. For like the famous Monkey’s Paw story, this return is truly a return of the rotting, decaying dead!
Once we have moved on from death says the poem, how can we move back? That is of course where Duffy and Christianity part company. The former seems to suggest that tampering with the cycle of life produces considerable problems for all. The latter regards such a transgression of mortality as essential to our faith in a transcendent God. We need a resurrected Lazarus for Christ’s power and forgiveness to be apparent.
With faith as Winterson says in The Passion, ‘All things are possible’. Duffy seems to be offering something slightly less faithful, yet not faithless surely? And truly provocative! AND Lazaus is resurrected but not without being physcially in a state of disrepair and profoundly bemused if not apologetic for his violation of mortal laws.
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I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a day
over my loss, ripped the cloth I was married in
from my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawed
at the burial stones until my hands bled, retched
his name over and over again, dead, dead.Gone home. Gutted the place. Slept in a single cot,
widow, one empty glove, white femur
in the dust, half. Stuffed dark suits
into black bags, shuffled in a dead man’s shoes,
noosed the double knot of a tie around my bare neck,
gaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself. I learnt
the Stations of Bereavement, the icon of my face
in each bleak frame; but all those months
he was going away from me, dwindling
to the shrunk size of a snapshot, going,
going. Till his name was no longer a certain spell
for his face. The last hair on his head
floated out from a book. His scent went from the house.
The will was read. See, he was vanishing
to the small zero held by the gold of my ring.
Then he was gone. Then he was legend, language;
my arm on the arm of the schoolteacher-the shock
of a man’s strength under the sleeve of his coat-
along the hedgerows. But I was faithful
for as long as it took. Until he was memory.
So I could stand that evening in the field
in a shawl of fine air, healed, able
to watch the edge of the moon occur to the sky
and a hare thump from a hedge; then notice
the village men running towards me, shouting,
behind them the women and children, barking dogs,
and I knew. I knew by the sly light
on the blacksmith’s face, the shrill eyes
of the barmaid, the sudden hands bearing me
into the hot tang of the crowd parting before me.
He lived. I saw the horror on his face.
I heard his mother’s crazy song. I breathed
his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud,
moist and dishevelled from the grave’s slack chew,
croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time.
This would make an excellent transformation text! Imagine recreating this text as a letter from Mrs Lazarus to a problem page editor. ‘Now you think you have heard most problems…let me tell you about my husband..’
Carol Ann Duffy has revisited many familiar stories with provocative results. However this poem resounds powerfully and enduringly for me as it is so engaged with the problematic representation of grief. The sorrow of Mrs Lazarus is inarguable. It is physically felt so that the body of the text testifies through the rage and then mononotone of the narrator’s voice, to the abject horror of being left. Death can make us feel betrayed. How dare anyone leave us to life without them? How can we negotiate a present and even a future in a world whose very coordinates have been removed? Ever word we are left with testifies to absence.
This seeming incompatibility between grief and self-regard seems resoundingly true. Everything is paced, is condensed, summarised through the bleak harshness of the lists of actions following on from Lazarus’s death.
Who is dead? Surely a resurrection at this point would be the miracle of all miracles? And yet life fails to yield up the magical intervention of divine resuscitation. Mrs Lazarus is forced by habit, by convention perhaps to go on. Suicidal thoughts and even actions become memory and the incidental details of a daily lived life start to resurrect her hope, her spirit. Healing emanates from seemingly arbitrary observation.
The conspiratorial glances of the villagers with their communal stench and malevolence contrasts with the separating fragile subtlety of the friendship between Mrs Lazarus and the school teacher. How far has she ever fitted in with these vulgar punitive figures we wonder? Has the exile of her widowhood just accentuated her difference from the mob down the road?
And why does Duffy keep Christ out of this poem? What does his absence engender in terms of the theatre of the cruelty almost created here? Think of Pilate’s Wife and we remember the provocative erotic retranslation of Christ through the yearning and resurrecting gaze of Pilate’s Wife. The barrenness of any loss makes a desire for a miracle compelling even irresistible; yet the dramatic irony remains here that it is not the resurrection of Lazarus that is rendered a miracle in this poem, it is the new interest in life by the narrator Mrs Lazarus. Paradise is briefly regained only to be lost again, through the interfering intervention of an significantly absent ‘Messianic’ figure.
Is there a subtle criticism here of Christ’s masculine lack of imagination, his disregard for connotation? I wonder…physically at any rate we collude with the narrator Mrs Lazarus in her revulsion at her returned prize of a husband as he is still very obviously dead..he smells of the grave..he is zombified and made thus replusive and unwelcome, even unto himself!! Out of time indeed! ( Now why do I recall one of the Roling Stones finest three minutes?!)
‘Dear Virginia Ironside…I am in a deep quandary..’ |
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