Comparing and contrasting treatment of similar subjects in poetry

Poetic Comparisons: The Death of Parents

How does one deal with the painful subject of a parent's death? If one is a poet, perhaps the 'logical' response is through the use of elegy and commemoration in verse of the lost parent. Both "Heirloom" by a.M. Klein (Geddes, 128) and "Keine Lazarovitch: 1870-1959" by Irving Layton (Geddes, 210) commemorate the death and life of one of the poet's parents. Both deal with the complicated subject of the death of a parent, as seen through the eyes of an adult. Yet the poems differ substantially in tone because both eulogize the parent of a different gender a.M. Klein sadly eulogizes the memory of his Torah-reading father, locked away in a different era of Jewish life with his books, while Irving Layton eulogizes the memory of his hard-working, shop-owning and more secularly oriented mother with a more complex and critical eye.

Klein views the persona of his Torah-reading father from the distance of a younger generation, and mourns indirectly his inability to connect with the man, even when he strokes the physical talismans of the man's dedication to learning. Layton takes the reader on a journey through the life of his mother, on a road through the many objects, events and places she experienced through her life -- the woman is at a distance, like Klein's father, but not lost to her son, for both are still in a complex and interconnected struggle with one another and with the Jewish experience and its relationship to modernity.

Thu, both poems deal with the subject of parental death from an explicitly Jewish cultural and faith perspective. But Klein while focuses on the death of the father, and the emotional implications of the death upon the life of the poet first and foremost, Layton focuses on the life of his mother, and the continued implications of that life on his own emotional state. He characterizes their various and multifaceted wrangling throughout the ages, rather than merely discusses the relationship he has with his dead mother, as does Klein. Both poets are concerned with detailing the physical objects and events that made up the course of their parents existence, but Layton stretches his poetic point-of-view beyond the reach of mere texts, and gives the reader a portrait of his mother in history, and the changes her own personal history underwent. Hence Klein's sadder and more mythical tone and poetic diction and references, compared with Layton's more life-affirming tone and poetic voice, and references that stretch beyond one era, of the shetel and ghetto and Torah.

This different stress upon the poet's emotive state can be seen it the first line of Klein: "My father bequeathed me no wide estates;/No keys and ledgers were my heritage;/Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates/Writ mournfully upon a blank front page." (1-4) the first stanza makes it clear that the poet's father was poor, and subscribed to the common Jewish heritage and made use of the Jewish liturgy in his daily life. The images tie Klein's father to the world of the Eastern European shetel, almost removed from the modern, daily concerns of contemporary life, even contemporary Jewish life.

In contrast, the dating of Keine Lazarovitch's life, although quite explicitly Jewish in name, notes that the woman's life spanned the century, beginning in the 19th century, yet stretching into the contemporary era of the poet -- and after the Holocaust. Rather than being relegated to one phase of Jewish existence, the Layton's mother changed along with the times, and along with the life of the poet. Rather than Klein's more stagnant relationship with his father, a man locked, in the past, the subject of the poem "Keine Lazarovitch" is almost as complex as the ebb and flux of Jewish life as a whole, rather than one segment of it, and her hold upon Layton is likewise more stormy, cyclical, and complex than the relationship of old to young detailed in Klein's poem about his father.

In Klein's poem the physicality of the father's books function the touchstone with which the poet accesses his father's memory, rather than his physical, father -- the father in death, much like the father in life is of the book, rather than a loving and guiding force, or even a force to be clashed with, as in Layton's poem. Klein's poem makes reference to the father's pamphlets, prayers, and tomes, as if these are the subjects of the man's life entirely, more than being a father, and even the astronomical metaphor towards the end of the poem makes reference to the Torah, rather than the real heavens. The final stanza depicts how the poet, "When reading in these treatises some weird/Miracle, I turned a leaf and found/a white hair fallen from my father's beard." (17-19) Even the physical self of the father is only touched through books, and it is a miracle the poet even has that much of a connection to his remote father of a lost Jewish past of learning.

But although similarly, "Keine Lazarovitch" is a poem of specificity, of specific dates much like the specific Jewish references to the "Books of the Baal Shem Tov, and of his wonders," (5) Layton's poem is a poem of modern specificity and connection, about the loneliness of growing old that the poet once witnessed in his mother, that he now experiences in his own life, rather than the "Pamphlets upon the devil and his crew;