The Banality, and the Wonder, of Illness

Virginia Woolf, in her incisive 1926 essay “On Being Ill,” wondered at the lack of great literature that addresses illness. “Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings…when we think of this…it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” Just as Woolf puzzled at reconciling the banality of a toothache or the flu with the often-poetic language we grasp at to describe suffering, so too does the speaker in “Morning After” struggle with finding words commensurate with her experience. Initially the poem compares illness with the drudgery of shoveling heavy, slushy snow, debilitating as it is dreary, implicitly rejecting the trite notion of new snowfall’s serene beauty. Her misery is underscored by a remembered analogy employed by her physician, who declares that to treat her recurrent uterine tumors is merely to “Shave them off/like a snow plow levels peaks.” As if recoiling at medicine’s utilitarian view of treatment, the speaker suddenly reimagines her illness, her bleeding startlingly transformed into “…the snow/white as my cotton panties/turning red with blood/and clots like chicken livers.” What was an onerous slog becomes a more mysteriously loaded “dark secret.” The poem’s final stanza deepens the paradox, as she is seen by passersby as only “a woman clearing a walk” who ultimately insists, spirit broken, yet not, like the final enjambment, “one’s own/life is all there ever is.”