'Yet Still He Fills Affection’s Eye'

"So many have died before us, that our deaths can supply but few materials for a poet . . . after so many . . . funeral dirges he must be highly favored by nature or by fortune who says anything not said before."' 

How to avoid lazy plagiarism or greeting-card sentimentality when remembering the dead? We are obligated to remember and elegize them but all the appropriate words and sentiments seem to have been used. Consider newspaper obituaries, composed in AI-like language, a soulless recitation of dates and survivors. The best you can hope for is that the name of the deceased is properly spelled. Half a century ago the first thing I wrote as a newspaper reporter was an obituary, a narrowly defined form in a smalltown paper. I felt guilty reducing an old farmer to a filled-in template. He deserved better.

 

Above, Dr. Johnson is writing in his “Life of Dryden,” conscious that elegies were cranked out on an industrial scale in the eighteenth century. Poets aped Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and John Milton’s “Lycidas.” In his “Life of Savage” Johnson had written: “He knew that the track of elegy had been so long beaten, that it was impossible to travel in it without treading in the footsteps of those who had gone before him.” Somehow, Johnson overcame the challenge when writing about his friend Dr. Robert Levet, one of life’s lost souls.

 

Johnson had met Levet in 1746, thus beginning another of his unlikely friendships (Levet was laconic; Johnson, effusive and conversation-loving). Boswell described him as “an obscure practitioner of physick among the lower people.” In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate writes of Levet:

 

“Since his return [from France], he had developed a wide practice among the London poor, walking long distances every day, from Houndsditch, near one end of the city, to Marylebone, at the other, ministering to them for a small fee, or, if they could not afford that, for anything they felt they could give him. Often this was no more than a drink of gin or brandy. Rather than go away unrewarded — though he never demanded payment — Levet would quietly swallow the drink, though he really did not want it; and he would occasionally end up drunk (‘Perhaps the only man,’ said Johnson, ‘who ever became intoxicated through motives of prudence’).”

 

Levet died at age seventy-seven of a heart attack in Johnson’s house on January 17, 1782, and the poet soon wrote one of his finest poems, “On the Death of Mr. Levet.” Here are the second and third stanzas:

 

“Well tried through many a varying year,

See Levet to the grave descend,    

Officious, innocent, sincere,         

Of every friendless name the friend.

 

Yet still he fills affection’s eye,      

  Obscurely wise and coarsely kind,

Nor, letter’d Arrogance, deny       

  Thy praise to merit unrefined.”

 

Bate notes its “calm Horatian style” and writes: “If it is a lament for this dutiful, awkward, and conscientious man, it is also a lament for life — for common humanity, and for the effort that human beings try to make, in this strange purgatory of our lives, to fulfill moral values and ideals.” 

 

Johnson himself was seventy-two and would die in less than three years, on December 13, 1784. Boswell tells us Johnson was visited at the end by “a Miss Morris, daughter to a particular friend of his.” Her identity remains a mystery. Johnson’s last days mingled the grotesque and the noble. He suffered from general circulatory disease, made evident six months earlier by a stroke; chronic bronchitis and emphysema, accompanied by growing breathlessness; congestive heart failure, the cause of Johnson’s fluid retention; and rheumatoid arthritis. In Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author (1998), Lawrence Lipking describes the scene shortly before his death: 

 

“Bloated with dropsy [edema], Johnson tries to discharge the water by stabbing his legs with a lancet and scissors until the bedclothes are covered with blood. He even reproaches his surgeon for not daring to delve far enough.” 

 

Miss Morris told Frank Barber, Johnson’s servant, that she must see him. “[T]he girl, too anxious to wait outside in case he came out with a refusal,” John Wain tells us in his biography (1974), “followed at his heels and stood there while Frank explained what she wanted. Johnson’s almost helpless body turned over in the bed; he looked at her and spoke, ‘God bless you, my dear.’ They were his last words. 

 

“At about seven o’clock that evening, Frank and Elizabeth Desmoulins were sitting in Johnson’s room when his breathing ceased, quietly and with no disturbance. It was some minutes before they realized that he had died.”