A. R. Ammons: Selected Poems
Posted: May 9th, 2006, 10:00 pm
"One Must Recall as One Mourns the Dead" (from The Snow Poems, 1977) achieves sublime pathos by refusing to mourn:
do not mourn the dead too much who bear no
knowledge, have no need or fear of pain,
and who never again must see death
come upon what does not wish to die
The elegiac strain in Ammons's poetry is surpassed only by the countermining impulse to say yes to the universe. "I know / there is / perfection in the being / of my being, / that I am / holy in amness / as stars or / paperclips," he writes in "Come Prima." The knowledge coexists with the recognition that the universe moves "from void to void" and that void and being are indistinguishable. Yet the poet's elation survives. Determined to convert fear into praise, and anxiety into poetry, Ammons balances his scientist's skepticism with the Romantic conception of the imagination as redemptive of, or compensatory for, the bitterness of actuality.
http://www.poems.com/essaleh2.htm
do not mourn the dead too much who bear no
knowledge, have no need or fear of pain,
and who never again must see death
come upon what does not wish to die
The elegiac strain in Ammons's poetry is surpassed only by the countermining impulse to say yes to the universe. "I know / there is / perfection in the being / of my being, / that I am / holy in amness / as stars or / paperclips," he writes in "Come Prima." The knowledge coexists with the recognition that the universe moves "from void to void" and that void and being are indistinguishable. Yet the poet's elation survives. Determined to convert fear into praise, and anxiety into poetry, Ammons balances his scientist's skepticism with the Romantic conception of the imagination as redemptive of, or compensatory for, the bitterness of actuality.
http://www.poems.com/essaleh2.htm