We Cannot Be Created for This Sort of Suffering

“They say I must remain confined to this room for some time,” John Keats wrote to his fiancée, Fanny Brawne, in early February of 1820, just days after he’d begun coughing up blood. In another letter to Brawne, he confided, “On the night I was taken ill—when so violent a rush of blood came to my Lungs that I felt nearly suffocated—I assure you I felt it possible I might not survive, and at that moment thought of nothing but you.” Keats blamed his poor health on “imprudently leaving off my great coat in the thaw I caught cold which flew to my Lungs.” He was not the only one affected. As he assured his sister: “Everybody is ill.”

The following months were wracked with more coughing, more blood, more exhaustion. “Illness is a long lane,” Keats wrote to Brawne, “but I see you at the end of it.” Yet his letters became increasingly grim. His doctor advised him to rest and to avoid all exertion (“I am recommended not even to read poetry, much less write it.”). In one of the final letters of his life, sent to his friend and occasional caretaker Charles Armitage Brown, Keats sounds resigned: “I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing.” Later in the same letter, he wonders, “Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”

Keats died on February 23, 1821, at age 25.

“I know from his letters that he would rather have lived,” the poet Joyelle McSweeney tells me. She has studied Keats’s work–and tuberculosis, the cause of his death—for the past several years. The result is her latest book, Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), in which McSweeney memorializes Keats as well as her daughter, Arachne, who died in October of 2017, when she was just 13 days old. The book—McSweeney’s ninth—is actually two paired volumes. Toxicon was written before and during her pregnancy; Arachne was written after McSweeney’s daughter died, “in the shock of grief and the re-arrival of Spring.” She believes the two books “[depend] on each other for life and death.” Yet she wonders: “If they co-gestate each other can they ever be born?”

“Vesica Piscis,” a poem from Toxicon, hints at the relationship between the books and speaks to McSweeney’s lineage as a Catholic poet. The poem’s title refers to two overlapping circles that create a symmetric center, but it alludes as well to Catholic iconography, in which the Virgin Mary is often depicted in the center lens of such interlocking circles. Death and an unexpected sweetness mix in the center of McSweeney’s kindred books, as reflected in her lines “delicious pest / delicious pestilence / delicious omen that waves its flag over the town.” Although each book stands on its own, the two share a certain typology, a sense of dark prophecy, with McSweeney’s style evolving to capture her grief. 

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When we say something is poetic, however vague the term, we often mean it is inherently tragic or melancholic. The life and death of Keats is poetic. His second extant poem, written in 1814, when he was 19 years old, is titled “On Death” and begins “Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream / And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?” Those scenes of bliss must be “transient pleasures” for “we think the greatest pain’s to die.” The poem ends

How strange it is that man on earth should roam,
And lead a life of woe, but not forsake
His rugged path; nor dare he view alone
His future doom, which is but to awake.

Keats is a touchstone for McSweeney, whose poetry has always been concerned with bodies and decay. The second section of Toxicon is titled “A Crown for John Keats.” It features 14 linked sonnets, which McSweeney calls “toxic sonnets,” steeped in the vivid language of the body and its decomposition: “I’m a threat to life”; “I release a noxious smell”; “Death-fletched, alive, immune to all elixirs, / I sit like a drone pilot at a dock of screens.” McSweeney’s language is textural, almost pulpy, and the mood of her work is akin to flu-like languor.

In 2011, McSweeney coined the term necropastoral to describe a literary zone of “infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion occultly present in the hygienic borders of the classic pastoral.” She identified writers in this tradition as Georges Bataille, Aimé Césaire, Leslie Scalapino, Kim Hyesoon, Christian Hawkey, and Wilfred Owen, whose “bad writing” Yeats deplored. She might also have included herself. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014), McSweeney’s collection of critical essays, is an illuminating companion to Toxicon and for her approach to Keats more broadly. The “definitive processes of the Necropastoral are decay, vagueness, interembodiment, fluidity, seepage, inflammation, supersaturation,” she writes.

The necropastoral is also an honest consideration of the natural life cycle: humans live, die, and are often interred in the ground to settle with the soil. Our bodies are part of this necropastoral world, the most supple moments of which are when bodies carry other bodies in the radical beauty and strain of birth. “Becoming a mother made me a goth,” McSweeney writes in The Necropastoral. “Becoming a mother, and nearly dying in the process” and wondering if her first child will survive, made McSweeney perceive “life on earth [as] a kind of Hades.” As a result, she now has “a vision of the present tense in which every moment has its opening on Death.”

For McSweeney, Keats’s “long lane” of illness is the necropastoral made flesh. “The crown of sonnets tries to operate from the position of the tuberculosis bacterium itself—the tubercule from the first line of the sequence—within [Keats’s] lungs,” she tells me. The linked poems mimic virality, with words or phrases from each sonnet reappearing in the next poem in the sequence. Each sonnet is infected. “I spread my toxic inklings like a cloud / -seeding-drone,” McSweeney writes.

These poems are not about Keats the man but about Keats the myth and the metaphor. McSweeney conceptualizes the sonnet form as “Keats’ lung” and the bacteria as “the diction and content,” projecting congestion and decay onto the poems’ other ostensible meanings. Art is then a “contaminatory, frothy, multiplying thing that makes the lungs not function—but makes them do something else, other than function,” McSweeney says. The lungs transform into conduits for verse. McSweeney makes illness simultaneously degenerative and generative, and the body assumes a new spirit form.

The sonnets pivot from this metaphorical connection with Keats to McSweeney’s vision of the contemporary necropastoral, in which she frequently fuses the human with the digital and the mechanical: “My throat’s an ulcerated weapons cache / where radioactive gunsights bleed their toxins / in groundwater.” Elsewhere, the narrator’s “hand bones shine white / in black light. O human hand, / so ringed, so digital, so metastasized, / punch my ticket as the waters rise.”

Despite what appears to be stagnation from afar, the animal and machine worlds keep moving in the necropastoral: “Static from old landlines / debrides the air, plastic phones in dumps / revise their toxic compositions.” Even in these crumbling spaces, McSweeney lends sweetness to the ruins. Pain and grace converge in her lines: “A fawn is drinking / in the middle of the stream. Trauma / kisses its reflection like a saint.” And her similes graft the religious onto the material world, each sustaining the other: “Some angel / flickers like an ice cream wrapper in a gutter.”

The crown of sonnets anchors Toxicon, but both halves of Toxicon and Arachne are marked by necropastoral themes of brokenness, decay, and language stretched to delineate bodies and souls at their weakest. In the second poem, “Ars Poetica,” McSweeney delivers a useful credo: “Bereft of sense / I don’t want to make sense / But I want to make something.” Her phrases and lines are often recursive, invoking a sort of necropastoral wavelength on which life exists on a continuum from divinity to degradation. This method works especially well when she examines the mask-as-persona, as with the biblical story of Veronica, who encountered Jesus on his way to Golgotha and wiped his face with a veil, “producing the fake known as the Shroud of Turin / Fake like a purse is fake and flashy / and sold on folding tables or a sheet.” The narrator embraces what is deemed fraudulent: “I wanted to wear the fake mask of Christ. / I wanted to wipe the face of the crisis with my heat.”

Sound is McSweeney’s last balm in the necropastoral. “Sound’s arrival and mysterious departure is the same as Art’s,” she has told me. “Where is it going and where has it been?” Her conception of sound “has a Catholic shape” in that it combines “the sorrowful and the joyful mystery” of human existence. These lines from “Axis,” for example, read like necessary breath caught in the throat: “a rivet // of nerve threads the hasp of the spine, / if there is a ticket, rip-it, a thicket, rip it up, / a spinning wheel, a hit song, flog it, a golden hair.” In “Rat Mask,” McSweeney bends sound in a return to Keats:

He
coughed up two fawns that fled
the sopping pleural wetlands of his lungs—
also ungulates—which threw their offspring up
through the throat of the great poet,
that they might enter the eternal
treasury of the stars.

Late in the poem, she creates another hypnotic rhythm: “into the dark river with its wrist, its thirst. / Its lust, its list, its amethyst.” McSweeney explains, “I like the twang of something not dissonating right, something awfully sonorous, I like the fear struck into me by unison. Sound first, then meaning in the twang, the off-rhyme, the absurd same-difference, the and/or, the wrong note, the dissonance.”

Toxicon and Arachne feel fevered in different ways. The latter is a testament, an emotional song that offers specific dates and settings: Arachne was born September 29, 2017, and lived less than two weeks in the silence of the NICU. “She was maybe her own lucky amulet, to carry herself immediately out of this bad world,” McSweeney writes in “Black Orchid.” “Held under her own eyelid and dreaming a wash of days, she opened her eyes three times and vanished.” Arachne is both spirit and body. Her presence suffuses “Post-NICU Villanelle,” an apostrophe in which McSweeney recalls the days before her daughter’s death:

your unfocused newborn’s eyes
peer up from your elsewhere
at the camera’s eye, the heat lamp,
your nurse, your father, & me. We for once
align.

The poem ends: “Some flower / lays its cool clean hand / across my eyes and, blind, I inhale you everywhere // nearby and leaving like Spring.”

I have always felt McSweeney’s lines, but never before have I outright wept at a poem—any poem—with such force, as if almost doubled-over with the poet’s own grief. Perhaps this is an unintended but welcome consequence of the necropastoral: in that funereal space, readers let down their guard. Cynicism vanishes. Life, whatever is left of it, is too beautiful to ignore.

In “And I Might Find Her If I’m Looking Like I Can,” the narrator thinks about Arachne’s short life: “O / what if she dies prematurely, before her premature death— / But every death’s full term. / arrives when it has to, unreluctant, full-blown.” Later in the poem, the phrase “I wept” occupies its own stanza, and then there’s a breathless final section:

loudest when your
respirator stopped
pounding in my ear like
money trying
to build a high rise
every afternoon
and every morning
and send it carombing
in the skies above Florida.

These swift, compact lines are not exclusive to the new book—they’re a staple of McSweeney’s syntax and style—but they feel particularly appropriate to this moment. McSweeney’s work is structurally and spiritually akin to a litany or a creed. “My notion of art is very maximalist and souped-up: I love spectacle, overload, magic materials, magic words, incantation and litany, incarnation and possession, spilling and wounds. Art as a sacred event,” she has told me. She adds that her “whole notion of the image, of symbol, of art and what it can do, has been conditioned by [her] immersion in Catholic culture, ritual, and art” since she was a child. Indeed, her work enacts an artistic transubstantiation: the mess, smells, and excretions of life are all part of a divine process.

This bodily, sensory Catholicism is a religion of the necropastoral and firmly in the tradition of the memento mori. The necropastoral defined even the holiest, the saints. “My ideas about how art comes into the world, issues from and courses back to bodies, supersaturating, spilling, bleeding, killing, reanimating, remaking, hosting, definitely maps onto my ideas about Catholic saints, icons, and mediation.” McSweeney has said she is “interested in absences as abscess—the area of lack that produces an excess, an infernal production, literature as pus. … We can go back to Catholicism on this one—the stigmata, the stain that bleeds, the statue that cries, the Virgin that bears.” Out of the necropastoral comes a radical faith. McSweeney writes in the lineage of Catholic artists who embrace the beauty and sensuality of death; in her work, the body is blessed but nonetheless temporary and perishable.

There is radical faith, too, in Toxicon and Arachne. The two books are a threnody and an offering. McSweeney tells me she completed the Keats sequence before Arachne’s birth. Later, when she was at the end-of-life meeting for her daughter, “the specialists all sat at the table one by one and explained technically what was failing about her body.” Arachne had a congenital diaphragmatic hernia, a condition that strained her lungs and her heart. “As this was explained to us,” McSweeney recalls, “the pulmonologists apologized for the technical language which they supposed would be unfamiliar to me. And I was like—bitter interior laugh—I spent the last year researching a sonnet cycle about Keats, reading books about the history of tuberculosis, I know all this lung terminology. All this pleural terrain. But that was on the inside. I was carrying the lung terminology on the inside, like tuberculosis."