Crossing the Bar

It is, to put it mildly, a narrow genre of literature: first-person accounts of someone who has survived death but is old enough to know it is quickly approaching. With the possible exception of love and the dynamics of the smitten heart, death is one of the foremost preoccupation of poets. The idea of mortality at a certain age suggests that perhaps every day should be relished, every opportunity for meaningful experiences embraced. But Tennyson is no young man. This poem is wisdom literature for those old enough to understand that the Death that is always approaching is your death; the lower case making the event yours, particular and pedestrian and remarkably unremarkable.

It is one thing to ruminate on death as an abstract and ponder the transition into whatever we believe is an afterlife but something entirely different when your body says it is time and directs the intellect to consider what is approaching. It is an intriguing concept. Does death announce itself? Do you feel in your heart, in your bones, in your very fiber that your death is coming to undo all of that? This is not a poem about death as a surprise.