In a letter to a friend, Monet admitted that while he was at his wife’s deathbed he found himself making mental notes on the light and shadows, the colors and composition, for the painting he would  eventually make. That revelation speaks to something those outside of the making of art don’t ever quite realize: even though art evokes great emotion and may be the product of great emotion, the making of it is very much an emotionless process. TS Eliot alluded to this when he said “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” This is not to say that artists are emotionless, or that the emotion expressed in a particular piece is fake or contrived, but that an artist must be able to remove himself from the influence of the emotion in order to make the necessary critical decisions in his own work to express that emotion. 

Now, with that bit of textbook nonsense out of the way here is an excerpt from Donald Hall’s book of poems titled “Without,” which is a chronicle of his wife’s battle and eventual death from leukemia. This piece moves me as much as any ever written and I am constantly amazed at the amount of dispassionate control Hall had to maintain in the writing to produce such an effective piece. 

 

“Dying is simple,” she said.
“What’s worst is… the separation.”
When she no longer spoke,
they lay along together, touching,
and she fixed on him
her beautiful enormous round brown eyes,
shining, unblinking,
and passionate with love and dread.

One by one they came,
the oldest and dearest, to say goodbye
to this friend of the heart.
At first she said their names, wept, and touched;
then she smiled; then
turned one mouth-corner up. On the last day
she stared silent goodbyes
with her hands curled and her eye stuck open.

Leaving his place beside her,
where her eyes stared, he told her,
“I’ll put these letters
in the box.” She had not spoken
for three hours, and now Jane said
her last words: “O.K.”

At eight that night,
her eyes open as they stayed
until she died, brain-stem breathing
started, he bent to kiss
her pale cool lips again, and felt them
one last time gather
and purse and peck to kiss him back.

In the last hours, she kept
her forearms raised with pale fingers clenched
at cheek level, like
the goddess figurine over the bathroom sink.
Sometimes her right fist flicked
or spasmed toward her face. For twelve hours
until she died, he kept
scratching Jane Kenyon’s big bony nose.
A sharp, almost sweet
smell began to rise from her open mouth.
He watched her chest go still.
With his thumb he closed her round brown eyes.