"Epitaph" by Gwendolyn Bennett

Mea culpa: at around 6:40 I say "5 lines" when I meant to say "5 feet."

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-My upcoming sojourn to fair Albion 
-The master of Persian poetry gives me a light slap on the wrist 
-The Harlem Renaissance! 
-Form is important, but it should follow function 
-Form as intellectual and creative scaffolding 
-English on the outside, Italian on the inside (A "Rossetti" sonnet?) 
-Syllabic Variation, and its usefulness for beginners 
-"Get off your ath let's do some math!" 
-The maternal onus on womankind 
-Big death = little lives 
-We want the best for our children, even if they're plants 
-The paradox of the suffering corpse 
-The misery at the heart of this poem 

Text of the poem: 

Epitaph 

When I am dead, carve this upon my stone: 
Here lies a woman, fit root for flower and tree, 
Whose living flesh, now mouldering round the bone, 
Wants nothing more than this for immortality, 
That in her heart, where love so long unfruited lay 
A seed for grass or weed shall grow, 
And push to light and air its heedless way; 
That she who lies here dead may know 
Through all the putrid marrow of her bones 
The searing pangs of birth, 
While none may know the pains nor hear the groans 
Of she who lived with barrenness upon the earth.

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 2-3: “Epitaph” by Gwendolyn Bennett 

            Today’s show is going to be relatively short and sweet. Before I get into it, thank you all so much for listening—if you’ve been enjoying Versecraft so far, please don’t hesitate to tell even just one friend about the show who you think would like it. For a podcast like this where the topic is pretty niche and having guests isn’t part of the model, having people recommend it personally by word of mouth is one of the most effective means for the show to grow. 

            I’d also like to let all of you know that Versecraft will be on a holiday break from December 20th to January 16th. My fiancée and I will be going to England, but once we get back the show will be back and running as usual. I do hope this will be a case of “absence makes the heart grow fonder” and not “out of sight, out of mind.” 

            Finally, last thing I’ll mention before we begin is that Dick Davis wrote to me, and while he was very happy with my analysis of his work, he did inform me that, contrary to a statement I made on that episode, only narrative Persian poetry is typically written in couplets—Persian lyric and epigrammatic poetry is usually written in monorhyme, a scheme where every line possesses the same rhyming sound. 

            Now, without further ado, let’s get to our poet and poem for today. Gwendolyn Bennet, who lived from 1902 to 1981, is one of the lesser known but highly talented figures of the Harlem Renaissance— an artistic, cultural, and intellectual movement of 1920’s New York that produced an unprecedented explosion of African American creative activity, from the genius Jazz compositions of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, to the philosophy and criticism of Alain Locke, to the novels of Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen, to the poetry of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and our writer for today, Ms. Bennett. Bennett was, in addition to being a poet, a short story writer, visual artist, journalist, teacher of art at Howard University, and an editor of the influential Black literary magazines Opportunity and Fire. After a lifetime of service to the guilds and communities of Harlem, Bennett, faced with political persecution for supposed Communist sympathies, retired with her husband to Pennsylvania, where she opened and ran an antiques shop until her death. 

            It was in contemplation of her future death, many decades prior, that she wrote this short but poignant poem:

Epitaph

When I am dead, carve this upon my stone:
 Here lies a woman, fit root for flower and tree,
 Whose living flesh, now mouldering round the bone,
 Wants nothing more than this for immortality,
 That in her heart, where love so long unfruited lay
 A seed for grass or weed shall grow,
 And push to light and air its heedless way;
 That she who lies here dead may know
 Through all the putrid marrow of her bones
 The searing pangs of birth,
 While none may know the pains nor hear the groans
 Of she who lived with barrenness upon the earth.

Formally, we can think of this piece almost like an English sonnet with its couplet cut off—though a single twelve-line stanza, the poem rhymes ABAB, CDCD, EFEF as if it is built out of the three quatrains of an English sonnet. This sense of quatrains is blurred however not only by the lack of spacing, but by the fact that thoughts and sentences spill over from one rhyme grouping to another—see, for example, how “she who lies here dead may know” must immediately continue into “through all the putrid marrow of her bones.” Though it’s clear for this and other reasons that Bennett was not trying to write a strictly orthodox sonnet, one wonders if she did originally intend this poem to be a kind of sonnet, but either cut the concluding couplet or else felt that she had said her piece by line 12. 

One of the things I’ve been trying to suggest in the past several episodes is that form should ultimately follow function, and this sometimes means that a poem doesn’t always turn out the way we intend: for instance, it’s silly and pointless to write a sonnet for its own sake, unless you’re doing it for educational purposes. The point of writing a sonnet is that the sonnet form can be a very useful, musical, and elegant way of organizing thoughts in relationship to one another—however, if the statement is simple enough that it doesn’t require the length of a sonnet, or if it doesn’t require the turn in thought which is built into the sonnet form, it’s always preferable to tweak the form to suit one’s needs rather dilute or distort the poem in order to adhere to a tradition. Alternatively however, sometimes the prompt to use a specific form, like an English sonnet, can spur a poet to develop their ideas in ways they would not have thought of otherwise in order to fit the form. 

Every case is different, and good judgement is what makes for good poetry. In general, we might say that if the thought is precisely expressed, the form should be faithful to that expression—if the thought is vague, working the thought into a predetermined form can help to lend the thought clarity, depth, and development. It’s often been my experience, and I’m sure it’s been many others’ as well, that I decide to write a poem in one form, and then that form morphs into a different one as I’m writing. I begin by calling upon a predetermined form to aid my expression, and once I no longer need it, I discard it for the form that the poem wants to take. One form blossoms from another. It’s important to note here that abandoning one form for another is not the same thing as abandoning form altogether. That’s a different kind of choice which really has very little to do with aptness of expression, and much more to do with one’s aesthetic philosophy. 

In the case of Bennett’s poem, we have an interesting situation, because while the poem is shaped like an English sonnet without the final couplet, it actually functions more like an Italian sonnet: the first seven lines describe a situation, and the final five lines explicate the feeling and motivation behind that situation. Grammatically, the poem is only one sentence, but this volta is marked not only by the semantic content but by a semicolon after the word “way.” Thus, while the poem superficially looks like a mutilated English sonnet, it could be more accurately described as a curtal Italian sonnet—an Italian sonnet that’s dimensions have been shrunk slightly. Note that the ratio of parts—7 lines to 5 lines— is quite close to the 8 to 6 ratio of a full Italian sonnet. 

We haven’t even touched yet on the most interesting formal quality of this poem: the variation of line lengths. Though there is some metrical variation, it’s safe to say that this poem is strongly iambic throughout. But are we in iambic pentameter? It feels like it—but if we actually count, we find that only half the lines are five feet long: the rest consists of three hexameters, two tetrameters, and one trimeter line. This is a kind of playing with form that we haven’t really encountered yet. In Season 1, Episode 6, I talked about how Janet Lewis’s frequent use of metrical substitutions stretched the limits of iambic rhythm, but ultimately remained just consistent enough to preserve the pattern in our ear. Bennett here is doing something similar, but instead of stretching the rhythmic pattern to its limits, she’s stretching our expectation for a certain quantity of feet—the syllabic pattern. If you look at some of Bennet’s other poems, you’ll see that this is a strategy she uses often: she’ll maintain an iambic rhythm but vary the lengths of her feet frequently. Unlike the extreme metrical variation of Janet Lewis’s poem, which is technically very tricky to pull off, a bit like the sudden time signature changes in Math Rock,  I think that this technique of line variation has a lot of potential for poets who are just learning how to write in meter: it allows them to think just about the rhythm, and master that before moving on to mastering how to express themselves in consistent numbers of feet. If any of you listening are interested in writing in meter but are intimidated by the idea, I suggest you try writing a poem that employs a consistent rhythm, maybe even a consistent rhyme scheme, but is otherwise as free as you please. I think you’ll find the exercise fun, and hopefully even useful. 

I have to be fair to Bennett though, and confess that what she’s doing with syllables is actually much more mathematically subtle than I’ve made it sound. Let me explain: a standard line of iambic pentameter—that is, one without a feminine ending— has five feet which each have two syllables, therefore, such an iambic line has ten syllables. Bennett’s poem is twelve lines long. If all her lines were in uniform iambic pentameter, her poem would thus be 120 syllables long. But three of her lines are hexameters—a foot extra for each of those lines adds six extra syllables. But wait— two of her lines are tetrameters; that’s minus four syllables. And one of her lines is a trimeter—that’s another minus four. Now we’re two under the pentameter standard. But wait! The second line has two anapestic substitutions, and the third line has another one. Because an anapest is a three-syllable foot, each substitution adds an extra syllable. Therefore, our grand total is 121 syllables in this poem, just one syllable over how many syllables this poem would be if it were in perfect iambic pentameter. To put it another way: Bennett isn’t simply making her lines as long or short as she pleases: she’s always borrowing from one line to add to another. Thus, though her poem often strays from iambic pentameter, iambic pentameter remains the standard to which the poem always returns. It is not only the mode, but the mathematical mean and median of this poem. 

Now that we have a better idea of the architecture of this poem, let’s begin again by looking at the first seven lines: 

When I am dead, carve this upon my stone:
 Here lies a woman, fit root for flower and tree,
 Whose living flesh, now mouldering round the bone,
 Wants nothing more than this for immortality,
 That in her heart, where love so long unfruited lay
 A seed for grass or weed shall grow,
 And push to light and air its heedless way;
 
 

The statement here is pretty straightforward: the speaker, when she dies, doesn’t wish for immortality, but merely that her body be fertilizer for new plant life. As with any poem however, what’s being said is deepened and complicated by how it’s being said. Let’s take a look at some of the diction. In line two she says: “here lies a woman, fit root for flower and tree.” She seems to imply that her status as a woman is what makes her fit to nurture the lives of flowers and trees. Already then, we see the seeds being planted of a maternal theme in this poem, one which will blossom forth as we continue to read. Tellingly, we also see the speaker accept the expectation that a woman’s role is to give birth to and nourish other beings. Metrically, this line is the most irregular of the entire poem, beginning with a trochee, marking a caesura with an amphibrachic substitution, and ending with an anapest. I suspect that after the introductory first line, which is rigidly iambic, Bennett wished to contrast it, once the “epitaph” has begun, with a looser meter to evoke a more natural sounding speech, like the beginning of a eulogy. 

In line three, we read: “whose living flesh, now mouldering round the bone.” There is a small riddle here: how can a dead body possess living flesh? The macabre but accurate answer is in the word “moulder” which means “to decay.”  The flesh that once belonged to a living woman is now alive with parasites and is living in the sense that it is providing the materials for life to these creatures and to the soil. By using language like this, Bennett shows us, beyond the explicit claims that she makes, that she speaks like a person who believes that death is merely the continuation of life in other forms, a philosophy which is borne out by the rest of the poem. Fittingly, there is an anapestic substitution on the word “mouldering,” thereby signifying a decay in the iambic line to match the decay in the body. 

In line five, the speaker claims that the love that she had in her heart remained “unfruited” during her life. This could mean a couple of things: namely, that her love never came to fruition—that is, was never expressed, reciprocated, or consummated—or that her love never produced a child. As the poem progresses, we will find reason to prefer the latter interpretation, but we may suspect that the first interpretation is in fact the cause of the second. 

Finally, in line seven, the speaker describes the weed that will sprout from her heart into the sunlit air as growing in a “heedless way.” Yet heedless, which means “with disregard” seems to here be used in a positive way. Perhaps, the speaker is suggesting that whereas she was oppressed by rules and obligations during her life, a subjugation which may have contributed to the fact of her childlessness, she hopes that her botanical offspring will live as freely as possible. 

With all of this context established, let’s now begin again and read through the entire poem: 

When I am dead, carve this upon my stone:
 Here lies a woman, fit root for flower and tree,
 Whose living flesh, now mouldering round the bone,
 Wants nothing more than this for immortality,
 That in her heart, where love so long unfruited lay
 A seed for grass or weed shall grow,
 And push to light and air its heedless way;
 That she who lies here dead may know
 Through all the putrid marrow of her bones
 The searing pangs of birth,
 While none may know the pains nor hear the groans
 Of she who lived with barrenness upon the earth.

In lines 8 through 10 we have a troubling incongruity: “that she who lies here dead may know/through all the putrid marrow of her bones/the searing pangs of birth.” A dead body cannot know anything, nor feel pain of any kind. I can think of two possible explanations for these lines, neither of which are entirely satisfactory: the first is that if she predicts that plants will sprout from her when she dies, she can experience the pangs of birth now vicariously in her imagination. This explanation ignores the fact however that the speaker is saying that she will experience the pangs “through all the putrid marrow of her bones.” The second and more intriguing explanation is that the speaker is here disassociating her conception of her life from the life she lived while in a human body—instead, she is seeing her life as being continued in the plants themselves. This would seem to accord with the phrase “living flesh” that we discussed earlier. However, this explanation also has its problems—though we can’t know the interior lives of plants, there’s no reason to believe that they experience birth pangs like humans do. We are left then with an irreconcilable problem. I suspect that this may be a case of Bennett’s fancy getting carried away at the expense of plausibility— a bad habit she no doubt inherited from the Romantic poets whom she and many other poets of her era admired. 

Regardless of this logical hiccup, the final lines of the poem return us to a convincing pathos: “while none may know the pains nor hear the groans/of she who lived with barrenness upon the earth.” It’s of course common knowledge that giving birth to a child is one of the most painful experiences a human being can undergo, but Bennett points out that the emotional pain of not being able to have a child, of being “barren,” is just as if not more painful than giving birth. It’s in light of this sentiment that we must read the entire poem as a kind of tragic prayer, spoken in desperation: if the speaker cannot have a child of her own, she hopes that at least her rotting corpse can provide life and nourishment to plants. It’s only in the end that we realize how shockingly sad this poem is— how wretchedly inadequate, as a woman and as a person, the speaker must feel to be having this train of thought. It’s as if she is saying the she will be most useful to the world as a festering piece of meat. We are at once impressed by the nobility and selflessness of her spirit, appalled by the depths of her helpless and innocent shame, and furious at the patriarchal systems which have compounded her own thwarted desire to have children into a sense of existential uselessness. As an instrument of compassion, I find this poem entirely successful. 

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

Epitaph

When I am dead, carve this upon my stone:
 Here lies a woman, fit root for flower and tree,
 Whose living flesh, now mouldering round the bone,
 Wants nothing more than this for immortality,
 That in her heart, where love so long unfruited lay
 A seed for grass or weed shall grow,
 And push to light and air its heedless way;
 That she who lies here dead may know
 Through all the putrid marrow of her bones
 The searing pangs of birth,
 While none may know the pains nor hear the groans
 Of she who lived with barrenness upon the earth.