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ABSTRACT
This essay seeks to establish a connection between the poet Don Maclennan's views on death and on the meaning of life. Specifically, after exploring the various attitudes that Maclennan adopts towards death, an argument is made that - owing to Maclennan's views on the meaning of life - neither one of these attitudes is more definitive than the other. Although such a reading stresses the ambiguous and unresolved nature of Maclennan's confrontation with death, evidence is supplied that such a reading harmonises with Maclennan's overall understanding of what poetry ought to accomplish.
I
Don Maclennan's poetry wrestles with what is possibly the most fundamental human question of all: the meaning of life in the face of death. In what follows, I shall elucidate how Maclennan's answer to this question (ultimately) rests upon a paradoxical tension between his atheism and a nostalgic desire for spiritual transcendence. Some philosophical texts will, in places, be referred to in order to clarify the most salient positions that Maclennan adopts when formulating both this question and his answer to it.
One of Maclennan's most haunting and focused poems - "Funeral 1" - provides a good starting point for such an analysis:
From the tired sky
the low-angled sun has burned
a dead robinia to gold
and gold a mulberry tree.
Two owls that laboured
through the failing light
are mourning in the folds
of darkness out of sight.
I, too, in the dark mourn
the death of my belief,
my small, uncertain faith that life
is proof against its own defeat.
("Funeral 1" 201)1
What, exactly, is Maclennan saying when he refers to the end of his "small, uncertain faith that life / is proof against its own defeat"? Since the poem is ostensibly occasioned by a funeral, it appears that Maclennan's already imperiled belief in life has been overpowered by death. This seems to have occurred because - for Maclennan - the good of life is not strong enough to resist being breached and eclipsed by death. As a consequence, the poem is not just describing Maclennan's bereaved response to possibly a friend or family member who has died: it is also describing how Maclennan is mourning the metaphorical death of his own belief that life is...