Today, we're going to talk about the joy and the challenge of detail. Most writers know and many writers say that the truth to the story lies in the details. To get us started, I'm going to take a look at two poems, both of which use detail in what is a first-person narrative to tell us the story. This first poem is by Auden. It's called Funeral Blues. It's a famous poem, I think not only because it's beautifully written and there's such emotional depth to the first-person narrative, but also all of the details of domestic life, of shared history, of the everyday are evoked in every line of the poem. The intention of the poem is not, be impressed with the bigness of this experience, which happens to be grief, but more, let us together look at all the little pieces that make this big grief. Funeral Blues. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, silence the pianos and with muffled drum, bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let airplanes circle moaning overhead, scribbling on the sky the message, "he is dead". Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves. Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West. My working week and my Sunday rest. My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song. I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now. Put out every one. Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun. Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood, for nothing now can ever come to any good. It is the details that make the poem and there are two kinds of details here. The small and the everyday. The clocks, the phone, the dog, the pianos, the traffic policemen, the working week, and the sunday rest. They open up to the bigger details, which are still details, but they're bigger and they are about the entire world that we live in. The stars, the moon, the sun, the ocean, the forest. It is that combination of the most intimate detail and the bigger detail that support the story of grief. This poem, on a lighter note, is by the American poet Jane Kenyon. It's called Happiness. It is to me a wonderful personal essay on the subject of happiness in the form of a poem. There's just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet, having squandered a fortune far away. How can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost and take from its place, the finest garment, which you save for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that you were not abandoned, that happiness saved its most extreme form for you alone. No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door, until he finds you asleep mid-afternoon, as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair. It comes to the monk in his cell. It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink. It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the basket-maker, and to the clerks stacking cans of carrots in the night. It even comes to the boulder in the perpetual shade of pine barrens, to rain falling on the open sea, to the wineglass weary of holding wine. The entire poem, again, is built on the intimate and the everyday. Then, the much bigger poem is about the wider world. So, it is the dust at your feet. It is making a dinner to welcome a relative home. It is that beautiful dress or suit that you save for a special occasion, which you cannot quite imagine or which you have imagined which hasn't come. It is the uncle you never knew about, and everybody has an uncle they didn't know about, who flies the single-engine plane, and so specific, onto the grassy landing strip and hitchhikes into town. We can see him with the dust still on his shoes and we see her napping when she's having a hard day in the middle of the, as she says, "The unmerciful hours of her despair." Then, there are all those other people waiting for happiness: the monk, the mother, the basket-maker, the pusher, the clerk stacking the cans of carrots. It is the specificity of cans of carrots that enables us to see the clerk, that enables us to feel the possibility of happiness and the despair that it will not come, that the plane will not land, that our uncle will not find us. It's that combination of details that gives this poem its resonance. So, that's what we're looking for. We're looking for the way in which the detail is the key to the essay.
