Obit by Robert Lowell

Our love will not come back on fortune's wheel—
in the end it gets us, though a man know what he'd have:
old cars, old money, old undebased pre-Lyndon
silver, no copper rubbing through... old wives;
I could live such a too long time with mine.
In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.
Before the final coming to rest, comes the rest
of all transcendence in a mode of being, hushing
all becoming. I'm for and with myself in my otherness,
in the eternal return of earth's fairer children,
the lily, the rose, the sun on brick at dusk,
the loved, the lover, and their fear of life,
their unconquered flux, insensate oneness, painful "It was...."
After loving you so much, can I forget
you for eternity, and have no other choice?

"[I]n the end, it gets us"--well, what gets us? Well, death, for one, as in "obituary," and "obit," the Latin word that means "he dies." But "Obit" isn't so much about death as it is the Life-in-Death that precedes it:

Before the final coming to rest, comes the rest
of all transcendence in a mode of being, hushing
all becoming.

"Obit" gives us two models of passing time: A cyclical one, as in "the eternal return of earth's fairer children, / the lily, the rose, the sun on brisk at dusk," and the linear one in which things decay and do not return. "It," then, is the Second Law of Thermodynamics again, the inevitable entropy of things large and small. The "rest of all transcendence" may be the end of all life's transcendent moments, or the negative transcendence--that is, the moving past and away--of life all together. In either case, the pathos of "Obit" is that what is wished for (the return of "old cars, old money... old wives," etc.) is not what will be met. (Oh, and that word "obit" literally means "he meets"...) Love will never "come back on fortune's wheel."

Brent, who asked me to write about it, loves this sonnet of Lowell's for the last lines, the volta. They become somewhat unnerving when we come to find that this poem was not written on the death of a loved one, but on Lowell's divorce from his wife. That makes it sort of creepy, but it also emphasizes the deathlike pain of loss, which must be lived with.