"A heart terrifying sorrow": An occasional piece on poetry of miscarriage

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 1997 by Anselment, Raymond A

The guilt common to grieving further complicates any simple paternal sense of separation and distinction. The father in Richard Jones's "The Miscarriage" also reaches out to cradle his crying wife, attempting to offer with his arms the comfort missing in his inadequate words of reassurance; the instinctive gesture, however, once again accentuates isolation. The helplessness implicit in his recognition "What did I know" belies conventional notions of the contained, even somewhat detached response documented in husbands' reactions to miscarriage.l9 "As I held you," the father in fact realizes, "I felt I had been caught." He can never, paradoxically, be part of that in which he feels so implicated:

The brief light of our souls

child too sad to show its face

shone upon my life, revealing

all the things I'd done

that can and will be used

as evidence against me. (16-21 )

The inexpressible guilt of these concluding lines reenforces an inseparability amidst the isolation, a shared loss that gives dimension to the poem's opening line, "The day we lost the baby."

Attempts by men to understand the sorrow from the mother's rather than the father's point of view often re-create the sense of loss with unusual sympathy. David Starkey imagines once again in physical terms the distance that separates a husband on academic leave in Mexico from his miscarrying wife:

Three thousand miles north,

his wife is vomiting. Her chin rests

on cold porcelain; she smells toothpaste

and urine. (8-11)

The vividness of her bathroom and the "rough, unfamiliar hands" of a hospital physician stress a vulnerability and alienation underscored in the final images of husband and wife. While he snaps a picture for her of festive children reaching out toward the spinning colors of a catherine wheel, his wife grasps for life amidst her own frightening lights: "She grips / the nurse's arm, seeing nothing but lights. / Everywhere, lights" (22-24). The emptiness, as Malcolm Mac Duncan understands in "miscarriage of her child," reflects the poverty of life, love, and self. The slipping away of the fetus becomes a slipping into the solitude and nothingness of an impersonal universe. "As if a stranger," the poem ends,

you watch the shape of your heart change

as if you yourself had become the stranger to your body

like the sunrise at dawn entering your head

like the other stranger, your unborn child

stealing an apple from the tree of life

and biting into the worm. ( 12-17)

By identifying completely with the mother and her longing, "The Miscarriage: Her Dream" imagines with unusual sympathy and sensitivity the maternal loss of self suffered in miscarriage. The mother's dream that Robert Crum imagines is a haunting image of a young girl who emerges silently from the dark woods and windswept snow, carrying, it would appear, enough water to put out a flame. The setting rich with the symbolic suggestiveness of dream evokes in the coldness of death the yearning for completion: "my sleep is this field where I am walking now, / in my wrong body, the lonely distance into a life / that has no life outside of my desire for it" (13-15). The mother's conscious re-creation of the disembodied "other," the "narcissistic self-object," is familiar to the psychology of miscarriage.2 The child with no identity of its own appears in the dress the dreamer's mother wore just before her own death; the girl not unexpectedly also resembles its parents in hair and eyes, and she sings with a voice that recalls moonlight nights long ago when the dreamer's sister sang in a sleepless bed. But the dream, both mother and poet know, can never be compensation for the uncreated life: