Praise and Lament, Part 9: The Dialectic of Praise and Lament

Now I’d like to turn to another aspect of praise and lament: the unexpected links between these two seeming opposites. We saw in Yehuda Amichai’s poem “The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy” that there is a connection between praise and lament. One learns to praise well by describing in detail the pains of life. I would like to take this even farther and say there is a dialectic of praise and lament.  

Like the ode, the dialectical method originated in ancient Greece. Plato and Aristotle developed a form of dialectic, but this method of reasoning was brought to fruition in nineteenth century German philosophy, particularly in the work of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel argued that the more an idea or moment in history became truly itself, the more it starts to bend toward its opposite. Eventually, from this conflict or contrast of opposites, a new synthesis is born.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I think there is a dialectic of praise and lament, because in all these poems we’ve discussed there are elements of both. Lament suggests praise, because if we feel the loss of something acutely enough to mourn its passing, then we are implicitly praising it. If it is worthy of being lamented, it’s worthy of being praised.

The other side of this equation is a little harder to see, but I think it makes equal sense. If something is being praised, there is a grain of lament in it, since nothing lasts forever or can be completely possessed. The more we value something and praise its virtues, the more we are setting ourselves up for lamenting it now or in the future.

To illustrate this, I’d like to focus on the final psalm of the Hebrew Bible, Psalm 150. Here is the King James Bible version of the psalm:

Psalm 150

Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his Sanctuarie: Praise him in the firmament of his power.

Praise him for his mightie actes: Praise him according to his excellent greatnesse.

Praise him with the sound of the Trumpet: Prayse him with the Psalterie and Harpe.

Praise him with the timbrell and dance: praise him with stringed instruments, and Organes.

Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.

Let every thing that hath breath, praise the Lord. Praise yee the Lord.

That’s about as straightforward an example of praise without lament as you can get in the Psalms. When it’s sung in English, there is usually only performed with rejoicing and hallelujahs. By the way, “hallelujah” means “praise God.”

Listen to how this psalm sounds in Hebrew, though.

If you’d never heard that piece of music before, would you think it was a hymn of praise, or a lament? It’s not that clear. It's a hymn of praise, but with a mournful tone. 

I think the closer you get to the roots of these two traditions, praise and lament, the more their roots are entangled with each other. If we are aware of that dialectic, whether we’re engaged in praise or lament, we can allow the opposite to add salt to our praises or honey to our laments, as the recipe demands.

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Praise and Lament, Part 5: Indirect Lament in Wislawa Szymborska’s “Cat in an Empty Apartment”

In this blog I'd like to talk about what I would call “indirect lament,” or a kind of mourning for loss that is not obvious. As an example, I'm going to discuss a poem by Wislawa Szymborska. 

Szymborska was a Polish poet who lived from 1923 to 2012 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Her life spans the years of Stalinist communism in Poland and the rise of the Solidarity movement that resulted in her country breaking away from the Soviet bloc. She is known for plainspoken language that expresses a surprising complexity of emotion and thought, her wry humor, and the depth she can encapsulate in just a page and a half of free verse.

Wislawa Szymborska

In the context of this blog on indirect lament, I’d like to talk about her poem “Cat in an Empty Apartment.” You can read the poem here in the translation of Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

It’s very clear right from the first line that this is a poem about death. But the seriousness of this opening is lightened by the figure of the cat, which doesn’t understand its human roommate’s disappearance. There is something slightly different in the cat’s world, but it’s not a major upheaval yet to the cat.

Finally the cat does get angry at the owner—the cat has moved from the first stage of grief, denial, to the second stage, anger. But the cat never quite gets beyond denial—it is not capable of moving beyond that stage. Maybe that is part of what makes Szymborska’s poem so poignant. Even at the end, the cat is still hoping that its human companion will return, and that the cat will be able to show its anger and then forgive the owner's extended absence. But death has made that reconciliation impossible.

Szymborska’s version of lament is gentle, whimsical, even funny. But in some ways, this heightens the sense of loss. The grief doesn’t hit you like an avalanche. The grief in the poem sneaks up on you and leaves a chord in a minor key resonating at the end, like a great jazz ballad. I think it could be argued that indirect lament can be as effective as its more direct sister. It’s significant that Szymborska wrote “Cat in an Empty Apartment” not long after the death of her husband.

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Praise and Lament, Part 1: Types of Lamentation

This series of blogs deals with praise and lament, two modes of writing that make up a large portion of literature. I’m going to focus on poetry in these blogs, but in a sense, many works of prose, both fiction and nonfiction, are also praises or laments. For example, all of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past could be considered a lament. Proust’s thousand-page novel laments the impossibility of holding onto the past—and holding onto love.

Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book on the effects of pesticides on the environment, Silent Spring, could also be seen as a lament. What is Carson lamenting in her milestone book? I would say she’s lamenting the absence of a world in which humankind lives in harmony with the natural world. 

Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is a lament for the moral destruction of an entire country, or an entire generation, or for the hope of a better world that the Russian Revolution represented at a certain point in history.

On the praise side, Jack Kerouac’s novels On the Road and Dharma Bums could be seen as hymns to the lifestyle and values and tastes of the Beat Generation. Terry Ryan’s memoir, The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, a book about how her mother overcame countless obstacles to provide sustenance and excitement for her family, is also a hymn of praise.

I think it’s easier to talk about praise and lament through poetry, though, in part because a poem presents a microcosm that’s easier to study than an entire work. And partly because I know more about poetry.

I’d like to begin by talking about lament. What sorts of things would a person want to lament in a piece of writing? Well, to name a few: death, loss of faith, losing a lover, losing a loved one or friend or acquaintance, tragedy, war, injustice. What is the common denominator among all these subjects? I’d say it’s loss: the sense that something that should be present in one person’s life, or in many people’s lives, or is no longer present, or has never been present.

There are many forms of writing or speech or song that traditionally are laments. Among them are elegies, eulogies, sermons, sonnets, ghazals, or the blues.

In the next installment, I’ll discuss a common form of lament, the song of the spurned lover.

Praise and Lament, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry