Poem of the Week: ‘Song On Reaching Seventy’ | TLS

Poem of the Week: ‘Song On Reaching Seventy’ | TLS

Poem of the Week: ‘Song On Reaching Seventy’

by John Hall Wheelock; introduced by Sam Graydon

Published: 18 January 2016

Bats Photograph: © Kevin Schafer/Alamy

John Hall Wheelock (1886–1978) was an editor at Scribner for over thirty years, publishing the work of Louise Bogan, May Swenson and Allen Tate among other significant poets of the twentieth century. Although Wheelock’s own poems are perhaps less known today than those he edited, he had a very long and successful poetic career.

The title of Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman’s “oral autobiography” of Wheelock claims him to be The Last Romantic, and the poem this week, “Song on Reaching Seventy”, which was first published in the TLS in 1957, bears out this assessment. The natural world – “sunset[s]”, “thrush[es]”, “cock-pheasant[s]” and “clouds” – is used as a point of departure for a physiological and emotional meditation on ageing. The speaker has a keener and more sincere appreciation of life with the passing of time. “As the night comes on”, “every sight and sound / Has meaning now”, every feeling and sense is “multiplied till the heart almost / Aches with its burden”. The intensity of life is so great as the speaker becomes “thronged with memories” of his now far-off youth that at the thought of them, joy is almost pain and pain is joy. And so, the poem ends with the desperate plea, “More time – oh, but a little more”, while being aware that life is only “the dream of self” – only with death can we know “the truth of all”. Far from being bleak, however, Wheelock reminds us that we must “sing” while we can.

Song On Reaching Seventy

Shall not a man sing as the night comes on?
He would be braver than that bird
Which shrieks for terror and is gone
Into the gathering dark, and he has heard
Often, at evening’s hush,
Upon some towering sunset bough
A belated thrush
Lift up his heart against the menacing night,
Till silence covered all. Oh, now
Before the coming of a greater night
How bitterly sweet and dear
All things have grown! How shall we bear the brunt,
The fury and joy of every sound and sight,
Now almost cruelly fierce with all delight:
The clouds of dawn that blunt
The spearhead of the sun; the clouds that stand,
Raging with light, around his burial;
The rain-pocked pool
At the wood’s edge; a bat’s skittering flight
Over the sunset-colored land;
Or, heard toward morning, the cock pheasant’s call!
Oh, every sight and sound
Has meaning now! Now, also, love has laid
Upon us her old chains of tenderness
So that to think of the beloved one,
Love is so great, is to be half afraid –
It is like looking at the sun,
That blinds the eye with truth.
Yet longing remains unstilled,
Age will look into the face of youth
With longing, over a gulf not to be crossed.
Oh, joy that is almost pain, pain that is joy,
Unimaginable to the younger man or boy –
Nothing is quite fulfilled,
Nothing is lost;
But all is multiplied till the heart almost
Aches with its burden: there and here
Become as one, the present and the past;
The dead, who were content to lie
Far from us, have consented to draw near –
We are thronged with memories,
Move amid two societies,
And learn at last
The dead are the only ones who never die.

Great night, hold back
A little longer yet your mountainous, black
Waters of darkness from this shore,
This island garden, this paradisal spot,
The haunt of love and pain,
Which we must leave, whether we would or not,
And where we shall not come again.
More time – oh, but a little more,
Till, stretched to the limits of being, the taut heart break,
Bursting the bonds of breath.
Shattering the wall
Between us and our world, and we awake
Out of the dream of self into the truth of all,
The price for which is death.