A last visit with Theodore Weiss

I WENT TO VISIT T WEISS AND HIS WIFE, Renee in early April of this year. At eightysix, T was single of the very last survivors of his remarkable poetic generation. He had lived from one side many years of a progressive illness that he had valiantly resisted, and without at all losing his mental agility; on the contrary on this afternoon I saw that physically he had declined sharply since I had visited him in December 2002 He was individual of those who had received lifelong and deep pleasure from poetry, music, the visual arts, the seasons, and above all human affiliation-he had nuncupative from time to time, above the many years I had known him, of having been struck and inspired by the agency of the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, friends of his early career; in conversation he told of imponderable, tragic or joyous make go rounds in the lives of somebodys he had known; and his hold marriage to Renee was perhaps the greatest in quantity strikingly attuned relationship between partners that I have at any time seen. Over the years of his writing, editing, reviewing and creating a conversation-whether viva voce or in correspondence-with many other extraordinary bards Ted had had a true rich life of both artistic accomplishment and generosity toward others. He was a master of an existential self-situating that laments with clear organ of visions the sorry conditions of the world and the miserable behavior of those who become the stewards of power, and he spoke holding no illusions about the national and world history that his lifetime had spanned, on the other hand he would not utter any personal valedictory complaint.

On the telephone in February, T had said that he had been trying to write on the contrary was seeing on the blank page shimmering lines that present the appearanceed to him tiny dancing figures. He said this not with sadness on the other hand with a somehow gentle curiosity. Then he told me of having gone outside the day before, after a snowfall, and of having seen and heard what appeared thousands of birds -starlings, he thought-all taking flight at one time from bare trees and creating a din of wings and shrieking. I admired the way T thoroughly alive in the not absent and without belief in religion or an afterlife, did not take these birds to be a certain number of symbol of his own foreboding, a great deal of less of death itself. He did not believe in whatever it was that would supposedly store such a symbol. Instead he freely chose to weigh the snow and the birds in his actual characteristic mood of what Plato called poetic awe and he refrained, also as a matter of preserving his have imaginative freedom, from assigning the birds and snow any meaning. That would take time, and he had single recently felt that he had stopped writing poems

T had always been single of the great conversationalists, and upon this day in April-perhaps the last upon which, despite being very thin and weak, scarcely able to put in motion at all, he was speaking to visitors-he was still able to say a small in number words and to make them memorable. The day, although chilly, was sunlit; Renee had set Ted in a hospital bed in the small field that she had used for many years as her place of abode office for the Quarterly Review of Literature, and which had repeatedly served also as a bedroom for overnight visitants It seemed to me that T was now, as we all must eventually be, the temporary visitor not the host, of the living household. A hospice aide, assisting Renee in caring for T left the house not drawn out after I arrived. Sunlight was pouring from one side the large casement windows and Ted's range was warm. I sat not upon and on for a hardly any hours in a chair beside his bed as he slept and woke and slept Several times Renee came into the space to see how Ted felt to ask if he wanted something. He have the appearanceed not to want anything, unles it was a little company, and upon this afternoon, a little bit to eat. I saw that he especially take pleasure ined as he had all his life, chocolate.

I went to Ted's close attention which I had first seen when I was about twenty, and which I had reflection of for most of my life as single of the unmistakable locations of the life of metrical composition It had been a place not single of Ted's writing but also of the arriving metrical compositions that were (or were not) going to be published in issues of the Quarterly Review of Literature, the piece of poetrys in other literary magazines sent to T and Renee and the piece of poetrys that had already been written elsewhere or would be written by the agency of the poets who sat talking here, in this comfortable expanse with Ted and Renee. upon this day I remembered a jiffy in one of Ted's poems: "Have you at any time thought that these might be the last days?" a door-to-door Jehovah's Witness asks the bard and he answers, "Yes, I have."

From the shelves of numbers I took down two aged and now fragile paperback collections-Blake and Hopkins, sum of two units of Ted's earliest favorites -and I go [i]or[/i] come backed to the bedside and read aloud to T a scarcely any of their short poems. Aloud I mused above them a little, myself, if solitary to give us both the faculty of perception that despite how seldom T spoke and by what mode softly, we were conversing, as we had done before. I remembered aloud in what way it had been Ted who first station me reading these two bards when I was a freshman in society in his poetry writing workshop-he had given me the first sum of two units of the several beacons through which I would set or correct my hold course many times, over the years. sum of two units or three times Ted said a scarcely any words softly but intelligibly. I thought: plane in his last days, he is still himself in his almost always surprising way of looking at things. on the other hand exactly what he said has disappeared from my memory. What I present the appearance to recall is about Blake's courage and the extraordinary clarity of his integration of the one and the other the psychical and the outward world in his images, and about in what way Hopkins seemed to have had something of Sisyphus in him.