Antidotes to Fear of Death

Sometimes as an antidoteTo fear of death,I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,I suck them from the quenching darkTil they are all, all inside me,Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myselfInto a universe still young,Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,The light of all the not yet starsDrifting like a bright mist,And all of us, and everythingAlready thereBut unconstrained by form.

And sometime its enoughTo lie down here on earthBeside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fieldsOf our discarded skulls,Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,Thinking: whatever left these husksFlew off on bright wings.

In 1986, Rebecca Elson (1960-1999) was a young Canadian astronomer who had begun a post-doctoral research fellowship examining Hubble telescope data at Princeton. In the essay From Stones to Stars, which concludes her posthumously published and single poetry collection A Responsibility to Awe, Elson contrasted the discomforts of working in such a male-dominated environment with her pleasure in the openness and congeniality of Princetons poetry community. But she went on to add a significant qualification, that the discussions there were also a reminder that, although I loved the unlimited licence to invent, I also loved the sense of exploring not an inner, but an outer world, that was really there, in some objective sense. This weeks poem seems to accommodate this dilemma, by working on a borderline between inventive poetic figures and more objective description, while never fully letting go of the former.

The opening lines are simple and striking. The speaker doesnt merely lie on her back to look up at the night sky, as any non-astronomer might do, but, childlike, she eats the stars. She goes on to tell us how she eats them: she sucks them, and finds the taste pepper hot and sharp. This is purposefully visceral and immediate, and a summons to the child star-lover in herself, a tuning-in to the old excitement before academia took over.

She continues the nutrition metaphor with the word stir in the third stanza, but a change of approach is heralded as were invited to follow her into the early universe: No outer space, just space. And now poetic diction is reduced, the whole imaginative process more restrained. The biblical creation narrative is recalled, when the earth was without form, and void yet the description, especially that of the not yet stars, feels logical and objective.

The alternative to stargazing and imagining, proposed in the fifth stanza, is To lie down here on earth / Beside our long ancestral bones Because of the placing of the conjunction in the first line And sometimes its enough the activity is subtly emphasised. Its at least as important as looking up at the stars to be aware of the horizontal neighbourhood, that of our long ancestral bones. The pun on long is beautifully judged here.

Elson doesnt refute biological science. Dead matter is transformed, but kept interestingly visible in the reference to cobble fields / Of our discarded skulls. Its an imaginative truce with fact, followed by speculation, and recourse to the soul-as-butterfly myth. Inevitably, the bright wings connect us to the bright mist in stanza four, as if a new creation might transpire from death.

Antidotes to Fear of Death is undated, and may have been written before the poet was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the disease from which she died at the age of 39. Its the kind of intense engagement with death that an imaginative young writer might make, regardless of personal circumstance. As an act of generosity, like so much of Elsons work, it includes readers by its imaginative accessibility and universal theme. Although antidote is a strong word, the poem has some power to challenge the individuals fear of extinction with a wider, less egocentric focus on space and time. It lies just outside religious consolation, and just outside scientific detachment. Imagination is all we have to suggest alternative universes, a quality required for survival, for poetry, and for the hypotheses of science.

A Responsibility to Awe was first published in 2001, and was reissued in 2018 as a Carcanet Classic. To read Elsons brave and gentle work during the current pandemic crisis is to take a fresh breath, and to see a little farther.

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Poem of the week: Antidotes to Fear of Death by Rebecca Elson - The Guardian