Wayfarers at Night: Choosing Literature That Comforts the Young

Perhaps now more than ever the young people in our care need to be guided to read and understand literature that addresses suffering. We educators have the duty to introduce our students to fellow wayfarers, those life-long literary companions who can re-appear with true comfort when it is inevitably needed.

As a teacher of literature, I work within a system that prioritizes measurable outcomes. My goals for classes must be stated in “learning outcomes,” statements of what the students will be able to do at the end of the course. When creating a course, I connect all assignments to these outcomes to prove that my students have accomplished what I said they would. While this approach certainly serves a purpose, it cannot capture all the outcomes of reading and interacting with great literature, not the least of which is preparation to respond to inevitable suffering.

Perhaps alongside course learning outcomes regarding critical thinking or writing, I should add “Students will read and memorize literature that can guide them later in life in times of suffering and hardship.” I could, of course, connect a few tangible assignments to this outcome—reading and memorizing—but the real test would far beyond the scope of any quantifiable assessment. The most important learning outcomes of reading such literature will be years in the future when the student recalls and leans upon the support of that literature.

My own life bears this out; I have returned to certain kinds of literature in times of crisis. When I was in college, I read and discussed the Christina Rossetti poem “Uphill” in a class. Its vivid comparison between life and an uphill journey has come back to me many times. On one of those occasions, I sat in the car as my husband drove me to the doctor, who I hoped would reassure me that my pregnancy was progressing normally despite my feeling that something was off. I looked out the window and somehow heard an inner voice ask the first line of Rossetti’s poem: “Does the road wind uphill all the way?” I answered myself from the next line of the poem, “Yes, to the very end.”

A week later, as I recuperated from what had become a traumatic second-trimester miscarriage, I found the entire poem “Uphill” to remind myself of the way Rossetti portrays the struggles of this life. The poem is a dialogue, and in the first stanza the questioner is assured by a quiet voice that the road winds uphill to the very end. Also, the day’s journey will last “from morn to night.” Perhaps discouraged, the questioner stops asking about the journey and instead begins to ask whether there will be “for the night a resting place.” The one answering states that there is “a roof for when the slow dark hours begin” and “you cannot miss that inn.” This sounds like little more than a promise that death awaits us all. Somewhat more comfortingly, later answers assure the questioner that at the end of the journey, she will find “other wayfarers at night… who have gone before” as well as “beds for all who come.”

Literary critics have long pointed out that Rossetti’s poem illustrates her belief in Soul Sleep, or the sleep of the soul during the period between death and the Second Coming when the body is resurrected and united with Christ. Rossetti portrays the pilgrimage of this life as one that is not so much a matter of combat and conflict; for her, the soul’s journey is a matter of perseverance in the teeth of exhaustion, both emotional and physical. Soul Sleep is the appropriate reward for the kind of weariness that one develops in this life.

As I re-read “Uphill” during a difficult time in my own life, I felt that weariness. Anemic in body and soul, I dreaded the uphill climb in front of me; I had to get out my sick bed and take up my responsibilities, which included caring for my young children as well as teaching. Although the poem’s metaphor of an uphill journey resonated with me, the assurance of a deep sleep at the very end was insufficient comfort. There was so much to deal with before that promised rest. First and not least, I had to help my older children come to terms with the loss of the baby we thought would complete our family. In particular, my seven-year-old daughter struggled with squaring belief in a good and powerful God with the death of her unborn baby sister.

After a difficult conversation with this child, I cast about for other portrayals of the journey through this life by which I could frame our loss. How fortunate that one piece of literature does not need to do it all. Individual works by various authors can play through a person’s life, one coming in when another fades out. Indeed, many other authors have written metaphors to capture the trajectory of a soul’s movement through life.

For poems that meditate upon the soul’s movement through life, one can look to much that was written by the 17^th-century religious poets. George Herbert, for instance, wrote of the soul as a guest in his poem “Love (III).” In this poem “quick-eyed Love” not only bids the soul welcome but “sweetly questions” whether there is anything the soul lacks. The soul confesses that he is not worthy to be the guest of Love. Yet Love continues to offer service and the poem concludes with the soul consenting to “sit and eat” the meat of Love itself.

And then there is John Donne’s poem “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” in which the poet, in his typical fashion, jumps from one metaphor to the next. Yet one primary metaphor reigns: the soul is a sphere that is whirled by “pleasure or business” and scarcely ever moves in its right orbit. So it is that the speaker finds himself riding westward on the very day that his soul ought to be inclining towards the east, towards the site of Christ’s crucifixion. The speaker concludes by asking Christ to chastise his turned-away-soul so that he might turn again to face his Lord.

I often draw my student’s attention to these kinds of soul-on-a-journey works of literature—of which there are many. Sometimes I ask them to memorize just one or two lines of a poem to have a short-hand way of looking back and clutching at the wisdom of others when they most need the support, whether suffering a private loss or confronting the larger issues of evil and injustice in the world.

As I write this, the world is coping with the messy remains of a pandemic, and we are witnessing the violence of war. The anxiety that many of us experience when reading about these events belies the fact that our culture first looks to the bleak comfort of news reporting, data analysis, technological solutions, or expert testimony. To our detriment, we ignore or minimize very real comfort of the wayfarers who have gone before us on the journey through life. Perhaps, now that we collectively feel more than ever how poor is the consolation of data, technology, and experts, it is time to reissue an invitation to listen to the wisdom of the poets.

Though I teach literature for a living and intentionally draw my students’ attention to the great literature they may someday need when faced with suffering, it was not the complex poetry of Donne or the masterfully simple poetry of Herbert that primarily entered conversation with my questions at a time of sorrow. No, it was literature meant for children that comforted me when I was grieving and struggling to comfort my children.

Here, it is worth remembering that the furnishings of the imagination are arranged in childhood, and it is often to the stories of childhood that we return in times of distress. C.S. Lewis makes good use of the journey motif in The Horse and his Boy, and the conversation between Shasta and Aslan at the end of that book brought me to tears when I re-read it as a sorrowing adult, struggling to explain death-before-life to my young daughter.

Traveling at night, hurt and heart-sore, Shasta tells his sorrows to a mysterious fellow traveler that he cannot see in the dark. He begins with his unfortunate childhood and continues through his recent terrifying journey North. At the end of his narrative Shasta asserts that he has had nothing but “bad luck” on his journey. For one thing, there were so many lions.

The fellow traveler replies, “I do not call you unfortunate,” and tells the boy that there was only ever one lion. Of course, Shasta wonders how this could be and the voice from the darkness tells him, “I was the lion,” who used various means—some of them seeming threatening—to guide Shasta’s entire life’s journey. In this short conversation, Aslan reframes Shasta’s story to show that he has been there all along. And, seen differently, the “bad luck” was in fact the guidance of Shasta to the one place he needed to be. Aslan reveals that he has been working to bring good out of evil throughout Shasta’s entire life but particularly during his harrowing journey to Narnia. Not all questions are answered; Shasta realizes that it was Aslan who wounded his companion Aravis, yet Aslan says only “I tell no-one any story but his own.” So it is that the voice in the darkness speaks the comfort of providential care to Shasta while also leaving unanswered some questions suffering.

The voice of the fellow night-time traveler in Rossetti’s “Uphill” offers reassurance that “other wayfarers at night” will be met with at the end of the journey. But what all of us will need on the inevitable struggles during our life’s journey will be voices alongside us right now that reframe our suffering as Aslan does for Shasta. Not all questions have answers—at least, not ones that we will ever know—but the voice itself speaks the comfort of goodness and love being the guiding power in one’s life.

Perhaps now more than ever the young people in our care need to be guided to read and understand literature that addresses suffering. Though it will always be important to encourage students to read that which interests them, teachers have a responsibility to choose some texts to introduce to students. From early childhood education through college education, teachers have a responsibility to provide stories and poetry that will give the child the language and images that they can rely on for a lifetime. For, though it is true that literature can be taught in ways that fit into to the cycle of assessment and measurable goals, it should never be reduced to such a threadbare exchange.

Reading is a way of connecting with others; it is also a way of orienting ourselves within in a world where we will suffer and witness others suffering. Too often, the only kind of reading about anguish that people do is the endless scrolling through one dismaying news story of violence, war, sickness, or disease. This “doomscrolling,” as it has come to be called, is the opposite of reading to gain fellow “wayfarers at night,” that is, those who have gone before, whose collective wisdom can guide us as we travel our own paths in life. Allowing current-events focused media and texts to form one’s imagination has far-reaching effects in life, not the least of which is the deprivation of the kind of comfort that only a wiser and older fellow traveler can give a tired and sorrowing uphill climber. Those of us who have the opportunity of educating children and young people have the duty to introduce our students to fellow wayfarers, those life-long literary companions who can re-appear with true comfort when it is inevitably needed.

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The featured image is “A Game of Hopscotch” (1925) by Erik Henningsen, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.