Reminiscence and Disappearance

 Elizabeth Wilson gracefully discusses the issues concerning conflicted subjectivity and ideology during the emergence and the aftermath of the City. Her discussion of the way “the fragmentary and incomplete nature of urban experience generates its melancholy” helps illuminate the ways in which Amy Levy’s poetry deals with loss and human meaning (107). In my explication of her poems, I refer to the speaker as female, and the dead person addressed as gender neutral. I am doing so simply because the poet is female, but I feel a little uncomfortable with assigning the person addressed with a particular gender.

In both “A Reminiscence” and “The Sequel to ‘A Reminiscence’” the speaker acknowledges and challenges the loss of human life. In the first “Reminiscence” (which literally means “a process of remembering”) she demonstrates how the constellation of lifeless objects fails to offer any meaning to the person who has died: “the glimmer of the cigarette,” the “picture in its frame,” “the blaze of kindled logs” all lead to “these dark mysteries of death” (3,5,7). Throughout the poem she uses caesuras between these objects to emphasize this fragmentary imagery that offers little insight about this person. However, she enjambs “why did you lead me in your speech” with “to these dark mysteries of death” to reveal that there is more to be said about the person who has died even though she feels incapable to do so (11-12). As Wilson explains, this “urban experience” causes individuals to have “a sense of nostalgia, of loss for lives we have never known, of experiences we can only guess at” (107-8). In “The Sequel to ‘A Reminiscence’” we not only hear the speaker’s anxiety towards her inability to accurately recollect the person who has died, but also her struggle to make sense of her own existence. The speaker expresses her melancholy by refusing to “feign” him/her as “dead” and intensifies this refusal by juxtaposing “dead” with “a voice” that “sounds clear”(6). This voice of the dead causes her to question the meaning of her own life. She asks “Can a man with motion, hearing and sight,/and thought that answered my thought and speech, be utterly lost and vanished quite?” (10-12). While she acknowledges that this person in bodily form has “vanished” she also sees herself in the dead’s “thought and speech” revealing her own mortality.

But in this stanza, the speaker is also acknowledging that she still hears this dead person’s voice suggesting that for her the person has not completely disappeared. But what do we do with this voice? The speaker explains that the gravestone that represents the dead gives no insight to this person she once knew. When she acknowledges this revelation, her “flowers that mocked” her “fell to the ground—“ and she realizes that “then, and then only” her “spirit knew” (20-21). These “flowers that mocked” suggest that perhaps dwelling on lifeless or (once alive, but now dead objects-like the flowers) offers the speaker no meaning when trying to recollect the life of the dead. The use of the dash could also suggest that trying to make sense of one’s death is also an endless and hopeless task.

The most troubling part of this poem, for me at least, is this last line: “Then, and then only, my spirit knew” (21). Does the poem offer us no hope—suggesting that our lives are meaningless and this is why “the flowers mocked” the speaker (20)? Or, does this poem suggest that we cannot look to lifeless objects for meaning (the gravestone, the “fresh-made mound”), but we have to find meaning somewhere else? The voice the speaker hears tells her to “go, find” her “friend who is far from here” suggesting that this person cannot be found within the lifeless body that lies underneath the “stone that stared” his/her “name and date” (8,16) So does this poem suggest that the speaker preserves, recollects, or recreates the dead person’s voice through the speech/writing act, or does it suggest that she can only fail in her attempt?