Lamb: 'The Old Familiar Faces'

 I think of Charles Lamb as an essayist, rather than a poet. But he was a poet, and he wrote a remarkable poem on grief and mourning. Those are recurring themes on this site.

Lamb’s poem is “The Old Familiar Faces.” It has this recurring line:

 

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

 

Eric G. Wilson’s account mentions the recurring line.

 

This poem depicts the repetition compulsion of inconsolable grief. If there is any hope in the poem, it is the possibility that we can choose how to mourn, and some forms of mourning are more soothing than others. There is nothing you can do about the darkness, but you can decide to whistle or not, and some tunes sound better. 

 

I understand nothing about grief.

But the poem and Wilson’s account of it sound right.

I whistle.

• Sources: Charles Lamb, “The Old Familiar Faces,” in The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch; Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1912, p. 668. The Poetry Foundation has it here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44519/the-old-familiar-faces

Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022, p. 126.

Wilson’s book is the subject of several notes, including “Charles Lamb’s Voice,” Jan. 10, 2024, about how Lamb’s writing was shaped by tragedy.