'Implacable, Bewildered, It Moves Among Us'

Some sixteen years ago David Ferry thanked me for a post I had written about some of the lines by Dr. Johnson he had interpolated into his poems. That email is long gone but I remember being touched by his buoyant sense of gratitude. That a man in his eighties, much honored as a poet, translator and academic, would acknowledge what a blogger had written about him seemed like a gentlemanly thing to do. 

Now I see that Ferry died at age ninety-nine on November 5, and it’s Johnson who comes to mind, with his Rambler essay published December 15, 1750:

 

“Every funeral may justly be considered as a summons to prepare for that state, into which it shews us that we must sometime enter; and the summons is more loud and piercing, as the event of which it warns us is at less distance. To neglect at any time preparation for death, is to sleep on our post at a siege, but to omit it in old age, is to sleep at an attack.”

 

Death, the great democratizer.

 

In 2009, Ferry wrote an essay on the occasion of Johnson’s tercentenary. “What Johnson Means to Me” was collected in Samuel Johnson After 300 Years, published by Cambridge University Press. Ferry’s is the least scholarly, most personal contribution to the Johnson Festschrift. He includes his poem “That Evening at Dinner,” which incorporates lines from Johnson’s review of a book by the justly forgotten Soame Jenyns, which he describes as “one of Johnson’s greatest essays” – high praise for a mere review. In the poem he recounts the story of “a friend of ours, an old lady whom we admired,” who slowly fails after suffering a stroke. Explaining his use of Johnson’s words in the poem, Ferry writes:

 

“I’m no good at generalizing and therefore I find it hard to say in short order what it is in Johnson’s writing that has meant the most to me. I find myself going back to particular sentences of his, and to uses I’ve made of them. There’s a poem of mine that’s an example of what I mean. It quotes from two sentences of Johnson’s and, indeed, I think of the poem as a reading of those sentences.”

 

“That Evening at Dinner" is ninety-two lines long, and I suggest you read it through to the final, humbling line, with its echo of Psalm 102:9. Here are the closing sentences of Ferry’s essay:

 

“Johnson is, to my mind, in his prose and in his verse, one of the masters of pity, unsentimental pity founded on his awareness of our situation in a universe we cannot fully explicate; and it is founded on his awareness that our limitations, our vulnerability, are what we, all fellow creatures, share, the actualities of our natures and of our circumstances. In thinking of Johnson’s writing, pity is a name for looking steadily at things. The evidence is everywhere in him, in the Ramblers, in The Vanity of Human Wishes, in the ‘Life of Pope,’ in the Tolstoyan severity and sympathy of the ‘Life of Savage,’ his Hadji Murad.”

 

Included in Ferry’s final poetry collection, Bewilderment (University of Chicago, 2012), is “The Intention of Things,” which concludes:

  

“It is the death that lives in the intention of things

To have a meaning of some sort or other;

 

“Implacable, bewildered, it moves among us

Seeking its own completion, still seeking to do so,

 

“But also putting it off, oh putting it off,

The death that is coming, that we are coming to.”