‘Love and Dread’ on Yom Kippur

(The following is an edited version of a talk I gave on Yom Kippur, September 16, 2021, at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism [SAJ]. I am grateful to the SAJ’s rabbi, Lauren Grabelle Herrmann, for the opportunity. )

After the second day of Rosh Hashanah services this year, I had a feeling I've never had before. It was a feeling of there being so much that lies beyond me, or any person, a feeling of heaviness about the many things I cannot change. 

The weather, for example—the heavy humid air, the wind, the fearsome heat and rainfall sweeping across the planet. Covid, hunger, human want, the movement of the spheres. It was a feeling of smallness and limits and, yes, a recognition of mortality. And yet it was good to allow myself to feel this side of reality, to let it in within the bounds of my native optimism. In all honesty, I have mostly refused to let myself experience the dark side for fear that I might succumb to it. 

This time, however, I was inspired to expand my view by Rabbi Lauren’s talk, in which she spoke so powerfully of the need to let in light in a dark time—but only after fully acknowledging the reality of suffering and pain. This sense of shleimut, of spiritual wholeness, is beautifully expressed in Psalm 139 as a godlike perspective: “the darkness and the light are as one to thee."

But when we speak of teshuvah—usually taken to mean repentance, but which we can take in its more literal sense of returning, and extend that to signify turning, or the profound personal change we contemplate on the High Holidays—I believe that trying to see the entire picture in all its shades might be a good place for us mortals to start. 

When Rabbi Lauren offered us the honor of teaching poetry on Yom Kippur again this year, I first thought of discussing Rilke’s poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo .” In that poem, the speaker contemplates the beauty of a headless and limbless statue of the Greek god of sunlight and healing. Suddenly, the speaker is struck with the frightening sensation of being totally exposed to the world, that “here there is no place that does not see you.” And then the poem ends with its famous, haunting, godlike command: “You must change your life.” What could be more relevant to a High Holidays discussion than those five words of turning? You must change your life.

Yet the more I pondered featuring Rilke’s poem, the more I had second thoughts. Dynamic and Romantic as the poem’s view of personal change is—a thunderclap from on high followed by a stern decree—I felt that I’d rather talk with you today about a poem radiating a more reflective and perhaps wiser view of how the real world turns.

Especially in these often frightening times, I thought a more balanced perspective might be more appropriate. The poem I’ve chosen—“Love and Dread” by Rachel Hadas—handles darkness lightly, and by its title you can tell that it rests on a fulcrum between near opposites. Such a midpoint could be an excellent place to begin thinking about teshuvah, from both a personal and a cosmic perspective. You may have read the poem in The New Yorker, where it appeared in November 2019, and where you can hear the poet read the poem aloud.

Before we read “Love and Dread” and look closely at it, I want to tell you a bit about Rachel’s life and background. I call her “Rachel” because she is a dear friend and an exact contemporary of mine, as both of us were born in 1948. A lifelong denizen of Morningside Heights and the Upper West Side, of Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, she is very much our neighbor. Her husband, the artist and filmmaker Shalom Gorewitz, is a former member of SAJ. In some of Rachel’s finest poems, she evokes details of lobbies redolent of cooking and floor wax and of the book-lined, prewar apartments of the Upper West Side.

Her last name, Hadas, might also ring a bell: Her father, the classicist Moses Hadas, was a member of a famous, ground-breaking generation of Columbia University critics and scholars that included Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun.

Indeed, the Hadases were a family of classicists. Rachel’s mother, Elizabeth Chamberlayne Hadas, met Moses in 1942 when he was her Latin prose composition teacher at Columbia University summer school. The daughter of a classics professor and a private school teacher, Rachel’s mother was a longtime Latin secondary school teacher remembered for Ferdinandus Taurus, her Latin version of Ferdinand the Bull, the well-known children’s book. 

For his part, Rachel’s father was professionally steeped in ancient Greek and Latin. After completing his doctorate at Columbia in 1930, he went on to become an innovative educator in the classics. In those days, few academics sought, as he did, to bring classic literature to wider audiences, to teach them in translation and with as much an interest in their meaning as in their grammar. In addition to his teaching, he was also a prodigious translator, rendering Sophocles, Euripides, and the Stoic philosophers into English.

Besides her heritage in the classics, Rachel was heir to her father’s deep connection to Judaism. Moses was born and raised in Atlanta, and his parents were Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking Jews. Trained as a rabbi, he graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1926, four years before he received his doctorate in classics.  Later in life, he continued to fulfill the rabbinical function of performing wedding ceremonies, specializing in marriages between Jews and Gentiles.

Following in her family’s footsteps as a classicist and translator, Rachel most recently published her version of Euripides’ Iphigenia Plays, has rendered the likes of Tibullus, Seneca, Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, LaForgue, Valery, and the modern Greek poet Konstantine Karyotakis into English, and is the co-editor of the magisterial The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present. 

Majoring in classics at Harvard, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year and was the poetry editor of the Harvard Advocate during her senior year of 1968-1969. She went on to earn a Master’s at Johns Hopkins and complete her Ph.D. with special distinction at Princeton in 1982.

“A desiccated daffodil”

Since 1980, she has taught at Rutgers, where she is Board of Governors Professor of English. Most importantly, for our purposes today, she is the author of at least 17 books of poetry. The most recent one, Love and Dread, was published in July. Let us turn to the title poem of that book now.

To set the scene, we can say the poem focuses on a couple lying in bed. Awakening from a nap, the speaker is thinking about aging and seasonal change, anticipating the death of her partner’s mother and the birth of a grandchild.

 Rachel Hadas 

 Love and Dread

A desiccated daffodil.
A pigeon cooing on the sill.
The old cat lives on love and water.
Your mother’s balanced by your daughter:
one faces death, one will give birth.
The fulcrum is our life on earth,
beginning, ending in a bed.
We have to marry love and dread.
Dark clouds are roiling in the sky.
The daily drumbeat of the lie,
steady—no, crescendoing.
This premature deceptive spring,
forsythia’s in bloom already.
The challenge: balance. Keep it steady,
now sniffing daffodils’ aroma,
now Googling a rare sarcoma.
The ghost cat’s weightless on my lap.
My mother’s ghost floats through my nap,
as, dearest heart, we lie in bed.
Oh, we must marry love and dread:
must shield our senses from the glare
and clamor of chaos everywhere.
Life bestows gifts past expectation.
It’s time to plan a celebration:
dance at the wedding, drink and sing,
certain that summer follows spring,
that new life blossoms from the past.
The baby is the youngest guest.
But just how long can we depend
on a recurrence without end?
Everything changes, even change.
The tapestry of seasons strange-
ly stirs in an uneasy wind
that teases dreamlike through the mind.
I reach for you across the bed.
Oh, how to marry love and dread?

The first thing we might notice about the poem is its rhyming. In our day, such regularly rhymed couplets might suggest humorous content, and indeed the poem has a refreshing lightness to it. The structure of two rhyming words suggests the balancing of the two sides of the “fulcrum” the speaker of the poem mentions, with love and dread the two sides of a seesaw. 

But the speaker’s wry, serene gaze can be undercut by the darkness of the rhyming word in the very next line. For instance: “now sniffing daffodils’ aroma,/now Googling a rare sarcoma.” It’s funny, but not so much. 

Despite Rachel’s engagingly informal style, her mastery of rhyme is one likely reason she’s been linked to the school of New Formalism. Regular though the rhymed couplets and four-beat lines of this poem may be, Hadas’s ingenuity counterbalances any suggestion of formal monotony. Note the two extraordinary changes she rings in the rhymes toward the end of the poem, as it rises toward its dramatic final question.

Everything changes, even change.
The tapestry of seasons strange-
ly stirs in an uneasy wind
that teases dreamlike through the mind.

Unexpectedly, the hyphenated word “strange,” rhymes with “change” in the previous line. Breaking a word at the end of the line that way paradoxically upsets the stability suggested by the structurally aphoristic statement “Everything must change”—even though the meaning of that statement suggests anything but stability. Although the use of “sight rhymes,” or “eye rhymes”—words whose spelling suggests they rhyme although they really don’t—was common in previous centuries of English verse, they can surprise the ears of today’s readers, and we can see Rachel making use of the technique in suggesting that “mind” may rhyme with wind.

From the poem’s very first words, its vocabulary and imagery, too, put across the theme of a struggle to find common ground between seemingly opposing forces. A daffodil, with its bright yellow petals, appears as an early harbinger of spring. For Wordsworth, as he writes in his famous poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the mental image of having seen “a host, of golden daffodils” soothes his loneliness. “And then,” he writes, “my heart with pleasure fills,/And dances with the daffodils.”

To the speaker in Hadas’s poem, however, the daffodil seems “desiccated,” a word that means either dried up or drained of emotional or intellectual vitality. It has the dry sound of the clicking together of the bones of a skeleton and lands heavily, adjacent to the delicate sound of the word it is describing, “daffodil.” Later in the poem, another yellow plant, the forsythia, is darkly described as a sign of a  “premature deceptive spring.”

And yet these thoughts of aging and deception are balanced by images of youth and its potential for growth and change. “Desiccation,” as it turns out, possesses complex meanings for this poet. In an essay in Piece by Piece, her absorbing new volume of selected prose, Rachel recalls a notebook of pressed flowers she assembled at age five under the tutelage of her mother. Joyous childhood memories are triggered by pieces of old Scotch tape no longer strong enough to hold the pressed flowers to the notebook pages. “What seems sheer desiccation unlocks its stored power” of memory, Hadas observes in the essay. 

Similarly balancing feelings of mortal dread with ones of vitality and love, the speaker in “Love and Dread” observes that

It’s time to plan a celebration:
dance at the wedding, drink and sing,
certain that summer follows spring,
that new life blossoms from the past.

A new grandchild is about to arrive. And, as in the happy ending of a Shakespearean comedy, it’s time for the lovers to join hands and for Love itself to reign. This is, after all, a love poem—one that celebrates love in the later stages of life, of course, but a love poem nonetheless.

Yet while love is present, the thought that it will end is a threat to it. Such dread is reminiscent of what we are experiencing today, for example, when we recite the Unetaneh Tokef prayer and wonder whether we will have been written into the Book of Life for the coming year. This is also a time when a wider sense of dread may crop up—dread about whether our planetary home itself will die by fire and water, for example. That latter concern rhymes with these haunting lines from Rachel’s poem:

But just how long can we depend
on a recurrence without end?
Everything changes, even change.

Returning to the theme of teshuva, I think the poem may be read to suggest that in these times, true personal change might require an encounter with the most basic elements of our emotional and spiritual and earthly lives—with love and with dread, for instance—without necessarily relying on the past for answers.