SLATE'S CULTURE BLOG

SEPT. 16 2014 9:13 AM

Clive James, Terminally Ill, Has Written an

Exquisitely Resigned Farewell Poem
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By Katy Waldman

Clive James in 2008.

Photo by Jeff Overs/BBC News & Current Affairs via Getty Images

The terminally ill Australian polymath Clive James, 74, a longtime contributor toSlate,
has written the kind of poem that will bring your day to a standstill. Japanese Maple
appears in the Sept. 15 issue of The New Yorker and it is heartbreakingly lovely, a
concentrated infusion of truths about natures amplitude and the human condition.

KATY WALDMAN

Katy Waldman is Slates words correspondent.

The rhyme schemeABABBis a traditional English quintain, not unlike the second
half of a sonnet with its closing couplet. The short third line in the middle represents the
heart of each stanza, as well as the poignant trailing off of the A rhyme sound. Sonically,
the stanzas are back-loaded, irrevocable in their drifting fall from A to B. There is a
sense of heaviness and rest, and of beginnings ghosting away. Robert Brownings poem
Porphyrias Lover uses the same template, without the pruned thought in the center;
that lyric unfolds a story about strangulation, told serenely. (No pain felt she, says the
unhinged narrator, I am quite sure she felt no pain.)
But I dont want to dwell too much on form. What gives Japanese Maple so much of its
throat-catching grace are its gentleness, resignation, and images that somehow achieve
the emotional resonance of hard-earned wisdom. Your death, near now, is of an easy
sort, James begins, conversationally, to himself. (He will move into the first person as
the poem gathers resolution, commitment to its own difficult goals.) The speaker
captures the fleeting discomfort of breath growing short (in a truncated line), but then
the rhythm resumes as he notes that his thought and sight remain intact. He says he
appreciates fine rain on a small tree. Yet he transforms this familiar tribute to the little
things into something biggerthe scene outside the window broadens into gorgeous
extravagance: Ever more lavish as the dusk descends/ This glistening illuminates the
air./ It never ends. The poem, opening out as its speaker drains away (an irony
captured in the brevity of the line it never ends), luxuriates for a moment in the
permanence of the rain. Then it contracts to acknowledge that James can only take my
share of the everlasting bounty. The rest will come beyond my time.
And thats the headspace we are in when James introduces his daughter, who picked
out the maple tree. She is both the promise of posterity and an aching reminder of what
he will lose. That central ambivalence erupts, synaesthetically, in the next sentences
incredible image of the tree: Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame. The
burning maple is loveliness and destruction intertwined, of course, and the vividness of
experience, and the always-startling thereness of the seasons. But it also sets up the
short fragment that follows, which feels both stunning and harsh in its simplicity: What I
must do.
What the speaker must do is die. But the lyric defers that destination: James resolves
instead to live to see the maples leaves turn red. In the final stanza, he conjures us
into the future, with a vision of the burning tree filling the double doors to bathe my

eyes so that a final flood of colors will live on. His anticipation of completion and
fulfillment, so different from our sense of dread, is wrenching. Carefully the language
fill, bathe my eyes, floodsummons the possibility of tears while skirting their
explicit mention. But the short third line packs another emotional punch: The apparition
of the maple will overwhelm James sight as my mind dies. (In a way, he is talking
about the sensory engulfment of death.) Now it is his consciousness consumed in fire,
burned by my vision of a world that shone/ So brightly at the last, and then was gone.
Anyway, Im crying at my desk now. Go read it.