Rock Island, IL. Pretty close to twenty years ago I spent a beery evening with a buddy who on that day had turned forty. At the time forty seemed a large number to both of us, larger to him than to me who lacked it by more than a decade, though it’s a marker I’ve long since passed—less like a milestone than a kidney stone, but passed it all the same. He seemed that night to be crashing against the jagged reef of regret, and I couldn’t find the key to the lighthouse.

Regret is as real as ringworm and many times as fearful. I respect it like I respect heavy farm equipment. But there’s a difference between indulging regret and giving it its due. We ought to give it its due. We who are parents especially ought to. Who can call up old offenses and not choke with thirst for the waters of Lethe or burn for the sweet balm of oblivion? Regret abides. It abides for many reasons, roads taken or not taken among them, no doubt. It abides, perhaps above all, because whereas being forgiven is one thing, feeling forgiven is another. For some of us, I suppose, regret is the default mode of consciousness, a habit of being.

So it seems to have been for that woefully under-read poet, J.V. Cunningham, the best epigrammatist since Jonson:

When I shall be without regret
And shall mortality forget,
When I shall die who lived for this
I shall not miss the things I miss.
And you who notice where I lie
Ask not my name. It is not I.

I don’t know of a poem that gets at that ‘default mode’ more efficiently than this one—nor of one that expresses so directly what it means to have regret at the very center of consciousness. Out ahead of the speaker there is aught but that undiscovered country that Hamlet meditated and the dreams that come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil. Behind the speaker, in the review-mirror as it were, there is aught but regret and a longing for “the things I miss.” Death does not mean the next thing, good or bad, but the cessation of longing—of missing what one misses. So to our regrets and to the mindfulness of our mortality we may add a third (and maybe a fourth) definitive feature of consciousness: loss, nostalgia even. Nostalgia, loss, death, and regret. That doesn’t leave much else.

But then there’s that wonderful little puzzle at the end of line three: to what does “this” refer? To regret and mortality as a joint “this”? Then the lines mean that when the poet who lived for his obsession with regret and mortality dies, he won’t miss the things he now misses. And that makes good enough sense. I’ll allow that.

But “this” surely refers also to poetry itself, to the writing of poetry, to the art of saying much in a little or of fixing thought in a felicitous phrase such as Donne did when he said, “Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, / For he tames it that fetters it in verse.” “This” means the thing the poet is doing right now.

It is this meaning of “this” that rounds out the poem and renders the concluding couplet so effective—and devastating. When the regret is gone, when the fixation on mortality is gone, when the longing and the loss are gone, but also when the craft is gone, the limitations of form that make meaningful effective expression possible—when all these are gone, the man, but especially the poet, ceases also to be: Ask not my name. It is not I. It cannot be I, for I am my regrets, my thoughts of death, my longings and losses. And I am my craft. My vocation is I. Take all this away, and there is no I, no self, no consciousness.

Notice what the poem leaves out: happiness, accomplishment, success, joy, and chocolate-covered donuts. Life is not these things. Life is regret, because history is the story of things getting shittier.

I don’t think it does any good to argue with the poem. I don’t think it does any good to say, “well I have a cheerier disposition than all that!” Compare it, say, to Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” another technically masterful poem in which “Life piled on life / Were all to little,” and what you have is one poem about regret and another trying to outrun it.

Tennyson’s speaker “will drink / Life to the lees”; he sees all experience as “an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untravelled world.” The poem ends in fine stately language—

We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are,
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield—

and the speaker has paid due respect to the prospect of death, but he will leave behind an “aged wife” and a son bound by duties he himself shirks. Let them live with regret, Ulysses as much as says. I will not let it undo me.

But to say so is to be undone by it. If Cunningham places regret at the center of consciousness, Tennyson feels it snapping at his heels. And yet there it is all the same, front it or flee it how you will.

Better to give it its due than to sit in a bar on any birthday and indulge the sorrows of a too too sullied flesh.

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Tagged as: consciousness, J.V. Cunningham, Lord Tennyson, regret