The Slow Goodbye

Hughes poem number four for the 11th grade is "The Seven Sorrows".

Yesterday, before we looked at the text, I gave the class a role play prompt for groups: "Three sorrows".

My favourite performance featured three students. First, two students approached a third who was sitting down. The two approaching seemed to be pushing and prodding and holding back, trying not to be the first to reach the other person. Finally one ushered the other in front and the front person stammered "A., I have bad news to tell you. He didn't make it." A fell to pieces.

In scene two a different one of the three took the chair,a nd the other two engaged in the same silent, physical argument over who was not going to have to tell the news. This time the news was "You have cancer."

The third time through, with the third student in the seat, the person playing the messenger said "The deal didn't go through."

In another role play, a girl was at a party, got raped in another room, then was scene throwing up into a toilet, then finally committed suicide. Y., who played the girl, was quite impressive.

In a third, a group therapy session featured a veteran who had had his legs blown off, a girl who had broken her arm, and a girl who had dropped her cookies and cream ice cream on the sidewalk. They argued about whose sorrow was legitimate and struggled to "support" each others' sorrows.

Here are the feedback notes from that class.

They held a very good discussion in both classes about the nature of sadness. In the 11-5 class we had a conversation about the sadness present in Hughes's life, and potentially the sadness he caused. His first wife, Sylvia Plath, committed suicide shortly after he left her for a woman with whom he was having an affair. Six years later, the woman he left Plath for also committed suicide, and killed their two year old daughter, by the same method Plath had used: gas. Bleak. There were passionate opinions shared about whether the responsibility for suicide can ever be blamed on someone other than the person who commits it. D. said absolutely not. She said this with such conviction, and so eloquently, ("No matter what the circumstance, it is never, ever the fault of someone surrounding the suicidal person. That person made a decision.") that her words will probably echo in the heads of her classmates in the future. I hope they will. D. is universally revered for being remarkably bright and articulate. When opinions are shared like that by students whom everyone admires, I feel like something important is happening in the classroom.

Today we got down to the poem's text. I hadn't actually been that keen on the poem, compared with some of Hughes's other pieces, but their comments breathed new life and significance into it. Before looking at the text we looked at this image to get an idea for the natural environment Hughes grew up in.

We talked about how the wind would rip across this setting (a moor), and how the transition between summer and winter would be significant. Because that transition was relevant to the poem, we also looked at and considered these images of autumn in Hughes's UK:

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Now read on to see how these images are relevant to the poem:

The Seven Sorrows 

   
The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle’s palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it’s gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox’s sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox’s prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

I asked them particularly about how structure and pattern in this poem contribute to meaning. They identified the patterns of repetition, the simple syntax at the beginning of each stanza, the long third line, and the gradual movement through images of nature into an image of a human contemplating the end of the natural year, and perhaps the end of his or her life. 

The poem's structure seemed, they felt, to emphasize the tedium, the length, and the inevitability of time. The seasons change, the winter comes, life is drawn out of the living organisms... the goodbye is not just sad, but slow. We watch it happen. 

L. pointed out that the slow goodbyes are the most painful, because we can watch them coming, like the pain of watching someone die from cancer. 

D. said that it seemed that the sorrows are presented so precisely because the speaker wants to convey exactly what's on his mind - he's contemplated these sorrows for a long time, and has given them an order and a structure, perhaps implying that he's had a lot of time at that window to contemplate the sorrow of autumn. 

There was another good bye today, that of Monica. She's back in the UK now, but will remain connected to the class by Skype and email. And I'll certainly keep running lessons by her and giving her updates on how the class progresses. We're hoping she might come back for a two week video unit in May.