Ralph Waldo Emerson in his later years but before his memory failed.
Prolific contemporary American poet Lawrence Raab painted a touching portrait of a great mind trapped by what we now recognize as Alzheimer’s disease. Ralph Waldo Emerson—the most important and influential American thinker and writer of the first half of the 19th Century—remained active as a lecturer and author into the post-Civil War era. But by 1879 to the despair of family and friends he had to give up public appearances. In his own words he explained:
I am not in condition to make visits, or take any part in conversation. Old age has rushed on me in the last year, and tied my tongue, and hid my memory, and thus made it a duty to stay at home.
Old friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, the physician and poet, lamented:
Emerson is afraid to trust himself in society much, on account of the failure of his memory and the great difficulty he finds in getting the words he wants. It is painful to witness his embarrassment at times.
The great man died in his beloved Concord home on April 27, 1883.
Raab was born in 1946 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He graduated from Middlebury College in 1968, and from Syracuse University with an MA in 1972. He taught at American University, University of Michigan, and since 1976 Williams College. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Raab is the respected author of several collections of poetry and was honored with the 1992 National Poetry Series award, for his book What We Don’t Know About Each Other and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.
A Friend’s Umbrella
Ralph Waldo Emerson, toward the end
of his life, found the names
of familiar objects escaping him.
He wanted to say something about a window,
or a table, or a book on a table.
But the word wasn’t there,
although other words could still suggest
the shape of what he meant.
Then someone, his wife perhaps,
would understand: “Yes, window! I’m sorry,
is there a draft?”
He’d nod.
Shed rise. Once a friend dropped by
to visit, shook out his umbrella
in the hall, remarked upon the rain.
Later the word umbrella
vanished and became
the thing that strangers take away.
Paper, pen, table, book:
was it possible for a man to think
without them? To know
that he was thinking? We remember
that we forget, he’d written once,
before he started to forget.
Three times he was told
that Longfellow had died.
Without the past, the present
lay around him like the sea.
Or like a ship, becalmed,
upon the sea. He smiled
to think he was the captain then,
gazing off into whiteness,
waiting for the wind to rise.
—Lawrence Raab
From The History of Forgetting. © 2009 Lawrence Raab published by Penguin Poets.
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