Frank O’Hara’s Fascination with Death
As I read O’Hara’s poems, I’m noticing a trend in his writing: he seems to mention death, both obviously and subtly, quite often, and he changes his attitudes towards the subject in each of the poems; the more he writes, the more depressing the poems become. The poems that struck me in particular were “For James Dean,” “Thinking of James Dean,” and 4B of “Four Little Elegies.”
In “For James Dean,” O’Hara pleads with the gods to have mercy on the young actor, whose life was taken long before his time was up. “For a young actor I am begging/ peace, gods.” He also laments the unfairness of Dean’s untimely death in a later stanza: “He has banged into your wall/ of air, your hubris, racing/ towards your heights and you/ have cut him from your table/ which is built, how unfairly/ for us!” As much as this caught my attention, the parts of the poem that interested me the most were stanzas 7 - 9, in which he seems to defy the gods themselves, basically laughing in the face of death. In some ways, this can add on to the theory that O’Hara was suicidal, by saying that because he wasn’t afraid of death, he embraced it.
The next poem, “Thinking of James Dean,” is a bit less confident when talking about death. “…had I died at twenty-four as he, but/ in Boston, robbed of these suns and knowledges, a corpse more whole,/ less deeply torn, less bruised, and less alive…” The tone of this poem is much more morbid and self-pitying, in a sense, than in the first poem; rather than holding his head up in a defiant stance, he chooses to stare silently at his feet.
To be quite honest, if one of my friends were to have shown me 4B of “Four Little Elegies” and told me that they had written it, I would be dragging them by the ear to a counselor. I can tell from the way that O’Hara is speaking here that he is dealing with a very deep, all-encompassing depression, especially in these sentences: “…For so long, it hasn’t cared to ask what is my name?/ maybe it would like to think I’m already dead./ But then, wouldn’t it ask? Well, it doesn’t matter./ It doesn’t matter that I’m really dead to it, not living…” At this point, whether or not he realizes it, this poem sounds more like a suicide note than a poem.
Perhaps it is because of O’Hara’s lifestyle that he felt this way: perhaps he felt that because his life was so fast-paced and so full that he had already done everything that there was to be done in his lifetime. If this is indeed the case, then I truly feel sad for him, because in my experiences, I have learned that there is always something to live for.
