Had I been more clever or alert I might have heard and recorded my brother’s last words before he died last August in hospice. A reader asks about this, and I admit I blew it. For the last week or so of his life, Ken was unconscious, occasionally moaning when the nurses shifted him in bed. It’s customary to focus on last words. Perhaps we expect wisdom, reassurance, a lifetime’s lesson pithily expressed. There is precedent. William Hazlitt, not the happiest of men, is reported to have said while dying, “Well, I've had a happy life.” Assuming its accuracy, I find that enormously touching. And there’s Gerard Manley Hopkins, dying of typhoid fever: “I am so happy, so happy.” Delusion or gratitude? I prefer to avoid the cynical interpretation.  I’ve just finished reading Imagination of the Heart: The Life of Walter de la Mare (Duckworth, 1993) by Theresa Whistler. I’ve grown deeply interested in de la Mare and his work in the last several years. The poet would die on June 22, 1956 at age eighty-three. He had been ailing for several years. On the evening of June 21, Whistler reports de la Mare told his nurse: “Oh, N [Sister Natalie Saxton], I do feel seedy!” To the end, interesting word choice. He had suffered another coronary thrombosis, was given oxygen and repeatedly pulled off the mask. He slept intermittently. Sir Russell Brain, the eminent neurologist and close friend of de la Mare, visited. “He was bright, even happy,” Whistler writes, “and joked: ‘I think we shall cheat them yet.’”   To a pretty nurse, de la Mare said, “It’s a long time since me met – you must have come out of a dream.” With prompting, de la Mare recited his poem “Fare Well.” Whistler writes:   “The longest day drew in quietly, and the short night fell. N had gone out of the room for a brief rest. The nurse who had taken her place tucked him in – it was 2 a.m. – and bent over him. She asked if he was quite comfortable. ‘Yes, I’m perfectly all right,’ he answered – then he caught his breath in one gasp and died. There was no time to fetch N or the others. The nurse could only wake them and tell them he was gone.”

Here I pause to remember a forgotten poet who remembered a slightly less forgotten poet – a reminder that all of us are eminently forgettable, regardless of our purported virtues. Walter de la Mare died on June 22, 1956, at age eighty-three. The journal Poetry assigned William Burford to write a remembrance of the English writer, “Master of Silences,” which was published in the November 1957 issue.  Scrap that.   As I was reading “Burford’s” commemoration, it seemed familiar. I dug around and realized I had written about the same piece almost two years ago, under its true byline: William Jay Smith. In the same issue of Poetry, the piece after Smith’s remembrance is a review by Burford (I trust) of a Hart Crane biography. Someone at some time, whether in 1957 or last week, switched bylines -- which, of course, bolsters my observations above about forgettability. Smith’s piece on de la Mare remains definitive:   “When a poet of stature dies, a silence settles upon language. One becomes suddenly aware that words will never again be handled as they have been by this particular man. All that can be said or heard resides in his poems: the rest is silence.”   So, what about Burford? I don’t think I had ever heard of him. I see he died in Dallas in 2004 at age seventy-seven. He had a long academic career and published at least three collections of poems. His work appeared prolifically in Poetry, especially in the nineteen-fifties. In 1967, he translated and published with Christopher Middleton The Poet’s Vocation: Selections from Letters of Hölderlin, Rimbaud, & Hart Crane. He translated minor work by Proust. I would love to say his poems are unforgettable, or even memorably funny and incisive, and that I have salvaged a forgotten genius. Here is “Local God,” published in the Summer 1953 issue of Southwest Review:   “There stands a man in Texas, can grab the rattlers by the tail and crack them like a whip, snapping the vertebrae. He is the curse of all the snakes; milks the venom out of their mouths and wraps them round his arms for bracelets. Strange to say how the little children all steal away from his loving fingers.”

“It is not easy to write essays like Montaigne, nor Maxims in the manner of the Duke de la Rochefoucault.”  Who could think otherwise? The two Frenchmen are masters of diametrically opposed forms. In Montaigne’s hands, an essay can afford to be expansive. In fact, expansiveness – which is not the same as lengthiness -- is a quality shared by many of the best essays, the ones that linger in the reader’s mind and grow more enriching with time. (Consider Guy Davenport’s “Finding” and Michael Oakeshott’s "On Being Conservative.") The next word or thought ought to come as a mild surprise but not a shock. That would be tacky. Good essays are unified only by the writer’s sensibility. No other form is so personal. It is a reflection of the essayist’s consciousness, but never an undammed stream of consciousness or gush. Montaigne often renders the uncanny sense that we are reading our autobiography.   A maxime or aphorism is written as tightly as a good poem. It is a nugget of moral good sense and not a syllable is squandered. Often it contains a verbal IED. It goes off unexpectedly and carries a sting. François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-80) is the master of the form. His genius was to make the unpleasant truth about human nature, our devotion to self-protection and self-regard at any cost, sound so familiar: “Yes, that’s me,” we say as we read his maxims, even as we congratulate ourselves on our splendid insight. There’s no escaping La Rochefoucauld’s moral x-ray. Here’s one of his best- known maxims, first in French then in the Oxford translation (2008) by E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, and Francine Giguère:   “Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autrui.”   “We all have enough strength to bear the troubles of other people.”   Virtue-signaling and self-congratulation unmasked in eleven (or twelve) words. La Rochefoucauld pared the truth to its unflattering essence. Implicit in the best aphorisms is not just the truth but a slap on our face for failing to recognize it. The observation quoted at the top was written by William Hazlitt and included in his Characteristics: In the Manner of Rochefoucault’s Maxims (1823). The English essayist says: “I was so struck with the force and beauty of the style and matter, that I felt an earnest ambition to embody some occasional thoughts of my own in the same form.”   Hazlitt doesn’t have the focused killer instinct of La Rochefoucauld. Nor does he distill his words the way the Frenchman does. Some of his purported maxims are paragraphs’ long and tend to be expository. A good maxim doesn’t explain. It demonstrates – a quality Hazlitt often fails to deliver. Take this from Characteristics:   “A selfish feeling requires less moral capacity than a benevolent one: a selfish expression requires less intellectual capacity to execute it than a benevolent one; for in expression, and all that relates to it, the intellectual is the reflection of the moral. Raphael’s figures are sustained by ideas: Hogarth’s are distorted by mechanical habits and instincts. . . .”   And so on, for another 230 words. That’s not an aphorism but an embryonic essay, which points the obvious: Hazlitt is an essayist, as surely as Montaigne. He needs several thousand for his prose to blossom. He is perhaps the Frenchman’s truest, most accomplished descendant.  Here his maxim almost succeeds: “The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savours less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people’s virtues.” Provocatively true but too long, too blunted. One sentence is usually best. Two will work when the spring is wound sufficiently tight. Let’s praise Hazlitt for his virtues, as in “On Reading Old Books,” in which he renders a nuanced judgment both literary and moral in his customary vivid prose:   “I have more confidence in the dead than the living. Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes – one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think to ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the merits of either. One candidate for literary fame, who happens to be of our acquaintance, writes finely, and like a man of genius; but unfortunately has a foolish face, which spoils a delicate passage:---another inspires us with the highest respect for his personal talents and character, but does not quite come up to our expectations in print. All these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of our reflections. If you want to know what any of the authors were who lived before our time, and are still objects of anxious inquiry, you have only to look into their works. But the dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.”   Hazlitt was born on this date, April 10, in 1778, and died in 1830 at age fifty-two.

I’ve just learned that the English poet Clive Wilmer died on March 13 at age eighty. I knew him first as a friend and champion of Edgar Bowers, Thom Gunn and Dick Davis, a co-translator of the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, a serious reader of John Ruskin and a fine poet in his own right. He contacted me by email in 2011 to endorse my impression that Ruskin was a sort of proto-blogger, especially in Fors Clavigera. In 1986, Wilmer had edited Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Other Writings for Penguin Classics, and from 2009 until his death, Wilmer was master of the Guild of St George, a charity “for arts, craft and the rural economy” founded by Ruskin in 1871. Wilmer wrote to me: “He is, as you have noticed, one of my guiding stars.” Ruskin shows up regularly in Wilmer’s poetry. From a three-poem sequence, “The Infinite Variety,” comes “Minerals from the Collection of John Ruskin”:   “The boy geologist who clove the rocks Here on display grew up to be the great Philosopher of colour into form And, in the products of just workmanship, Discerned the paradigm of the just state.   “It was the Lord’s design he made apparent— These bands, and blocks of azure, umber, gilt, Set in their flexing contours, solid flow That has composed itself in its own frame: Red garnet neighbouring mica, silver white; A slice of agate like an inland sea . . .”   Cool urgency in language coupled with acuity of vision is rare. I see it is Ruskin and Wilmer. In my dealings with him, Wilmer had a grateful, celebrative spirit, without overdoing it. He didn’t seem like a complainer, begging for attention, nursing a grievance. He sent me a copy of New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2012). I remember telling him his last name reminded me of the first name of the gunsel in Dashiell Hammett’s novel and John Huston’s film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. It was news to him and he was delighted. Wilmer takes his epigraph to New and Selected Poems from Ruskin’s 1849 volume The Seven Lamps of Architecture:   “When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our father did for us.’”   This suggests Wilmer’s approach to poetry – an aversion to “planned obsolescence.” His poems acknowledge tradition with nearly every word he chooses, without being slavishly imitative. He titles a poem “To George Herbert”:   “Time and again I turn to you, to poems In which you turn from vanity to God Time and again, as I at the line’s turn Turn through the blank space that modulates – And so resolves – the something that you say.”   Wilmer’s placement of “the line’s turn” is witty and humble, as is “turn / Turn,” in which some of us hear a wayward allusion to Ecclesiastes. The word “conversation” has lately been debased, turned into a feel-good token, but Wilmer, like any good writer, carries on a conversation with the good writers who preceded him. “The something that you say”: All is vanity, not excluding pretensions to originality. The historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote in an essay, “So Why Read Anymore?”: “Nothing that we experience has not happened before; the truly ignorant miss that, hypnotized by sophisticated technology into believing that human nature has been reinvented in their own image.” Wilmer titles another poem “Shakespeare” (“In Memoriam: E.E.I.”):   “I must have been just eight – it was 1953 – When in some parlour of my mind he pulled a chair out Like a book from a packed shelf, then sat down and got going. Fifty-eight years have passed and he hasn’t finished talking Nor I listening. My father was already dead, My mother’s now been dead for thirty years. Who else Have I got to know like him, learnt more from, loved more freely?”