'I Shall Not Be Here When You Are Gone'

Some very bright people I know pay attention to dreams, taking them seriously and interpreting them the way they might interpret a poem written in their honor. When I worked half a century ago in a Cleveland bookstore, we sold little pamphlets of dream interpretation, mostly to black customers. The books decrypted dream imagery. The presence of a cat meant thus and such . . . A regular customer explained to me that some people relied on the books when they played the numbers. This was alien to me but I understood it as yet another manifestation of the human urge to make sense of the world. 

My tendency is to think of dreams as intriguing or banal little peeks into the unconscious, but essentially a random firing of electrons, unaccompanied by a definitive scholarly gloss. In other words, entertainment, like an interesting new television streaming service. The other night my brother, who died in 2024, showed up in one of my dreams. We were in the woods behind the house where we grew up. Recounting a dream can be deadly dull, I know, and this one was hardly more than a flickering image. We were going somewhere, not wandering aimlessly, and I was not aware that he was dead. In other words, there was a veneer of realism mingled with fantasy about this brief narrative.

 

I woke with a mingling of wonder and sadness. The primal part of me wanted to be comforted, as though Ken had come for a visit and wished to reassure me – of what? The more stringently rational part of me said: “Nope.”

 

Edwin Arlington Robinson returned to his home in Maine from Harvard in July 1892, in time for his father’s death. The poet was twenty-two and would live until 1935. As his biographer Scott Donaldson writes, “EAR would never be entirely quit of his father’s ghost.” In 1921 he wrote a sonnet, “Why He Was There”:  

 

“Much as he left it when he went from us

Here was the room again where he had been

So long that something of him should be seen,

Or felt–and so it was. Incredulous,

I turned about, loath to be greeted thus,

And there he was in his old chair, serene

As ever, and as laconic and as lean

As when he lived, and as cadaverous.

 

“Calm as he was of old when we were young,

He sat there gazing at the pallid flame

Before him. ‘And how far will this go on?’

I thought. He felt the failure of my tongue,

And smiled: ‘I was not here until you came;

And I shall not be here when you are gone.’”