Our Last Awakening: Poems for living in the face of death, edited and annotated by Janet Morley

Author: Janet Morley. Review by Harvey Gillman

A few months ago I was sent, anonymously, this book of poems on the theme of death and bereavement. It is quite extraordinary to receive such a gift out of the blue. If the donor is reading, I am grateful!

On holiday in Spain I read two poems each morning, as a sort of meditation. There are many benefits in meditating on death, for such is a meditation on life itself. As an adolescent I was fascinated by the French existentialists, who wrote of finding value and morality in the face of death. I also found echoes of this in my later reading of Buddhist writings.

Janet Morley is a feminist Methodist theologian and poet. Her book is divided into several sections: ordinary mortality; fears and fantasies; actual crisis; immediate grief; remembering and celebrating; and hope. In all there are fifty poems. Morley takes each poem, gives a helpful background on each poet, and then analyses the work. Some of the poems were known to me, but a few were new. For the most part they are very human, with a whole gamut of reactions: the almost pious, the celebratory, the emotional, the angry, the subversive, the rebellious, and the resigned.

The first poem in the ‘ordinary mortality’ section is the well-known ‘Fern Hill’, a paeon to life by Dylan Thomas. What a glorious way to introduce the theme, though I am not sure the word ‘ordinary’ is appropriate! The last poem, in the section on ‘hope’, is ‘Let Evening Come’ by the New England poet, Jane Kenyon. This beautiful, serene poem does not talk of death as such, but offers a melancholy reflection on time passing and of acceptance. It begins:

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Though Morley is a theologian, for the most part there is no preaching here (though priests John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Baxter are included). When I first read the ‘hope’ section I was a little worried that I would be given too-easy comfort. Earlier sections had included almost angry poems, with a refusal to resign, poems of great dignity, such as Laurence Binyon’s ‘The Burning of the Leaves’ and Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’. I also admired two poems by modern Quakers, ‘The Unprofessionals’ by UA Fanthorpe and ‘Familiar’ by RV Bailey. These embody a sort of everyday grief, the thing we experience and try to make sense of, but from unfamiliar perspectives.

Two memories came to mind when reading this book. The first was one of the earliest pieces of ministry I heard when I joined Friends over forty years ago: ‘Those who are afraid of dying are those who have been afraid of living’ – this really needs thinking about! The second is a passage in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. There we see a picture of Wheatfield with Crows by Van Gogh. We turn the page to be told this was Van Gogh’s last picture. We are told to look again at the picture. Do we now see it differently? Do we see life differently when we contemplate death?

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