Luminous with Manifold Illusion: Rereading as Postmortem or Death of the Poet

“I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean.”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 28.

The day I heard a line from Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” when walking up Semaphore beach (“The seasons are no longer what they once were”), something equally as intriguing started to transpire. Ashbery’s line prompted me to think of the final two lines of TS Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”. This oft-quoted work ends on the troubling but oracular note, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper”.

As I continued to walk, a new relationship began to solidify in my mind between the closing lines of Eliot’s poems and the environmental disaster at hand. As my step count grew, so too, did my concern for how Eliot’s poem, which I knew was written in the aftermath of WWI, might be capable of speaking to the present. Eliot’s encapsulation of disillusionment in the face of modernity—with his “stone images”, spiritually hollowed out men and “this beach of the tumid river”— presented itself to me as an apt antidote for the existential despair of confronting the climate crisis at hand.

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In How to Read a Poem, Edward Hirsch argues “poetry calls for an active reader” to “imaginatively collaborate with a poem to give voice to it”. Hirsch highlights a work’s dependence on human intervention, through attention and imagination, to breathe life and meaning into poems. Ralph Waldo Emerson goes further to argue in “The American Scholar” (1837) for what he calls “creative reading”, wherein what we read and reread becomes “luminous with manifold illusion” (29).

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As I pressed further up the beach, the bleeding sphere of sun moved in a slow abseil descent down the blue cliff of sky. My surroundings—like my prior interpretations of Eliot’s lines—slowly faded and were replaced with new details. The sand, once yellow, turned grey beneath my feet and the number of people appearing at the shoreline gradually increased. One by one, I counted the smudges of human silhouettes multiplying in the distance.

Up close, a dog bound towards me in deliriously large leaps, damp driftwood clamped between the bright white of teeth. As he sprinted towards me, I tried to not think of the news from the day prior about a dog euthanised for what a vet suspected was Algal bloom poisoning.

As the dog before me neared and slowed, I heard again the line from Eliot’s poem—as if it had been trailing me up the beach, imploring me to listen— “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper.” The creature then pressed his hot torso against my shins and snorted as I stroked his glossy coat, strewn with sand.

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When the Algal bloom started, the bodies of sea creatures the ocean spat out from its lapping tides were small at first, mostly fish. Then, the size of the creatures grew and the species diversified.

One afternoon, I stumbled upon the full but lifeless wingspan of a stingray flattened against dry sand. Their leathery skin was shrivelled like jerky beneath the sharp midday sun. Dark sunken gaps framed where their eyes had once been. I tried to avoid thinking of what kind of predator might have plucked them out; tried to forget this kind of cruelty existed within nature, which seemed defenceless to the whims of human activity.

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These unsettling patterns we had witnessed on the beach now appeared to me as signifiers of the ocean’s silent asphyxiation under the weight of the toxic bloom. The months of foamy water coughing up and spitting out sea life—when thought of in tandem with Eliot’s prophetic line—made me conceive of these symptoms as the great body of water’s whimper. Or, as nature’s desperate groan against the strains of human activity.

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Jean-Paul Sartre argues in What is Literature that the “creative act” is both an incomplete and abstract “moment in the production of a work” (42). He then articulates it is “the joint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind” (43).

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One Saturday morning, the ocean’s whimper grew louder.

My wife arrived home from her morning walk, recounting the scene. Nose reddened by the cold, jacket collar crisp with salt. The tides had evicted an ailing dolphin. She described how the crowd of frazzled beachgoers congregated around the large grey creature lodged in the sand—along with the pleading look of distress in the dolphin’s eyes. The witnesses had tried to comfort the dolphin in a cocoon of wet towels as they waited for the vet to arrive and end the struggle.

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This act of rereading the lines of Eliot’s poem—albeit divorced from its original context and shed of its religio-nationalist connotations—reminded me of Barthes’s assertions in S/Z. Here, Barthes identifies the plurality of texts (11), and with it, a work’s capacity to host various meanings that rely on readerly negotiation. He emphasises that to read “is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them” (10).

If we extend Barthes’s theorising, one could argue that the act of rereading is to place a poem in a site of perpetual configuration of meaning. Each reencounter both honours the “plurality of signification” (Barthes 1970, ix) but also denies the work any fixed or stable meaning. The same logic is adopted by Barthes in “The Death of the Author” (1986), where he argues “the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author” (55). Perhaps, this act of rereading poetry reenacts the killing of the poet anew, with each return.

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By September 2025, individuals wearing long blue shirts appeared in the beachside car park. They moved in a loose pack towards the shoreline, wielding long sticks with mechanical fingers that clenched when they tugged a lever. I watched as they plucked scaly bodies from the brown tangle of seaweed and tossed them into large buckets and bags. Some dragged wheeled carts that left long curling trails on the sand. They removed the scatterings of death that spread out like a rash across the shore.

At night, the tide crept in and wiped the marks off its hind, erasing the evidence of human life. The only sign of human activity left in the morning was the fresh deliverance of bodies from the whimpering sea.