Poetic Pain

Lay Back the Darkness

Edward Hirsch – 1950-

My father in the night shuffling from room to room
on an obscure mission through the hallway.

Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream
and ease his restless passage.

Lay back the darkness for a salesman
who could charm everything but the shadows,

an immigrant who stands on the threshold
of a vast night

without his walker or his cane
and cannot remember what he meant to say,

though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy,
while his left shakes uselessly in warning.

My father in the night shuffling from room to room
is no longer a father or a husband or a son,

but a boy standing on the edge of a forest
listening to the distant cry of wolves,

to wild dogs,
to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops. 

Understanding and Empathising With Suffering in “Lay Back the Darkness”

Poetry has long been a channel for humans to express their sufferings. As Professor Marilyn Chandler McEntyre declares, “The history of poetry provides a record of pain”[1], allowing us to better understand and deal with agony. Edward Hirsch’s poem, “Lay back the darkness”, is a perfect embodiment of this sentiment. This poem is a restrained piece that documents and processes the speaker’s response towards one specific moment of suffering: the declining health of a family member. Specifically, the speaker’s father has Alzheimer’s disease, which comes with the inability to think coherently, weakening memory and having irrational fears. I argue that through dramatising the impact of the father’s illness, the speaker is able to grapple and eventually empathise with the particularity of this suffering. The poem shows how the speaker has undergone a long process from understanding to empathising with his father— a gradual awakening. This paper will show how exaggeration, imagery and structure are used to help the speaker to understand the father’s pain, and how the development of the poem reflects the progression of his emotional connection to his father, allowing him to empathise with his father eventually.

The speaker begins by trying to understand the father’s suffering, and he uses exaggeration and imagery to enhance his comprehension. He uses words like “mission”, “vast night” and “forest”  (“Lay Back the Darkness”, 2, 8,15) to describe Alzheimer’s  disease. By provoking images of vastness, these words exaggerate the repercussions of the father’s disease and allows the speaker to grasp the seriousness of this condition. It illustrates how the father is completely overwhelmed by how the illness is limiting his consciousness. In addition, to highlight the vulnerability of his father, incapacitated subjects like “immigrant” and “boy” (“Lay Back the Darkness”, 7, 15) are used. Both immigrants and boys are ill-protected because they lacked the resources to cope with challenges of life, so is the father whose mental faculty is dwindling. The father was once a shrewd salesman, a ‘local’ in his familiar state of mind, but is now an ‘immigrant’ in his fuzzy mental state; he was a strong father with years of experience, but is now as helpless as a ‘boy’. Through such tension, the speaker learns how unprotected his father really is, that social constructs like social role and age cannot inoculate him from the setbacks of life. As shown, exaggeration and imagery deepens his understanding of the father’s disease.

Furthermore, the structure of the poem reflects his growing understanding of the father’s cognitive condition, because the use of negative space and rhyming scheme embodies the mental state of the father. Patients with Alzheimer’s  disease are unable to have coherent thoughts and suffers from loss of memory, and the structure mirrors these disabilities, showing that the speaker has a deep understanding of his father’s struggles. Firstly, this poem appears to be sparse compared to other traditional poems; between every couplet, there are a lot of empty spaces. Such deliberate use of white space is used to mimic the father’s broken thoughts and loss of memory. Due to Alzehmier’s disease, his father often “cannot remember what he meant to say” (“Lay Back the Darkness”, 10). The use of white space becomes a visual representation of the father’s thought process, allowing the speaker to pin down the father’s fleeting thoughts, so the speaker can examine it concretely to further enhance his understanding. Secondly, although this poem is written in couplets, the couplets do not rhyme. I see it as an attempt to slow down the pace of the poem, and to mimic the father’s slow thought process. This approach is a stark contrast to the usual sense of urgency accompanied by rhyming couplets, such as Ben Jonson’s “On My First Daughter”[2], where the rhyming couplet conveys a sense of haste and briefness, just like the daughter’s short life. In a similar vein, the gentle pace of “Lay Back the Darkness” is a subtle extension of the father’s debilitating mental faculties. Contrary to Jonson’s poem, the lack of rhyme in “Lay Back the Darkness” deters the reader from reading the poem too quickly, offering a glimpse into the father’s obstructed thought process.  Thus, through the subtle adjustments in the structure, the speaker displayed a profound yet restrained understanding of the father’s mental state.

After gaining a deeper understanding of the repercussions of the father’s illness, the speaker is finally able to bypass the emotional barricade, and empathise with the father’s fears, as attested by the development of the poem. The development of the poem mirrors an escalation in the speaker’s level of understanding. This poem is separated into two distinct parts by the refrain “My father in the night shuffling from room to room”(“Lay Back the Darkness”, 1, 13) repeated at Line 1 and Line 13. The first part focuses on the external, bodily description of the father, mentioning his physical weaknesses like “his left [hand] shakes uselessly in warning” (“Lay Back the Darkness”, 12). The second part focuses on the internal description of his mental state, highlighting his internal, irrational fears, which is a common condition among Alzheimer patients[3]. We can see the use of volta here. In the first part, the speaker was unable to ‘penetrate’ through  (“Lay Back the Darkness”, 3),  his father’s thoughts because he lacked a comprehensive understanding of the father’s mental state; but in the second part, as his understanding deepens, he is able to enter the father’s consciousness and understand his fears imposed by Alzheimer’s  disease, by describing him as a ‘boy’ in the midst of a spine-chilling forest, haunted by “shuddering” wingbeats (“Lay Back the Darkness”, 17). Moreover, throughout the poem, there is an escalation of imagery to mirror the speaker’s understanding of the internal peril faced by his father. The imagery gradually changes from gentle to frenzied, from vague to specific. Initially, a formless imagery like ‘darkness’ (“Lay Back the Darkness”, 5)  is used to describe the father’s condition. In the later half of the poem, the imagery sharpens into a shape, taking the form of hostile animals like ‘wolves’ and ‘wild dogs’ (“Lay Back the Darkness”,15) to highlight how intimidating the disease can be. Therefore, being able to enter his father’s consciousness and gaining a precise grasp of his fears, shows that the speaker can finally empathise with his father.

All in all, the speaker, by dramatising the impact of the father’s illness, is able to understand and eventually empathise with the particularity of this suffering.He comprehends this suffering by using exaggeration and imagery to magnify the impact of the illness and highlight the father’s vulnerability. This is also conveyed through a unique structure with the excessive use of negative space and slow pace to mirror the father’s broken thoughts. Additionally, by orchestrating the development of the poem, by shifting from external, bodily descriptions of the father to internal descriptions of the father’s mind,  he is able to enter his father’s consciousness and gained empathy. In Hirsch’s hands, this ‘unwieldy’[4] suffering is transformed into a profound poem, demonstrating that poetry is an effective mechanism that helps the speaker, and us, to cope with the vicissitudes of life.

Reference

1. “Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia.” Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia, https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/what-is-alzheimers.
2. Jonson, Ben. “On My First Daughter by Ben Jonson.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50665/on-my-first-daughter.
3. “Speaking of Suffering: Poetry and Pain.” Biola University Center for Christian Thought / The Table, 20 May 2019, https://cct.biola.edu/speaking-suffering-poetry-pain/.
4. Hirsch, Edward. “The Question of Affirmation and Despair: An Interview with Edward Hirsch.” The Kenyon Review 22.2 (2000): 54-69. Web.
5. “Lay Back the Darkness by Edward Hirsch – Poems | Academy of American Poets.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/lay-back-darkness.