George Gray

Because “George Gray” is one of more than 200 poems conceived as an interrelated single work, to illuminate the poem one might begin by looking at another poem from the same work, the epitaph of Mrs. George Reece, a courageous single mother left to raise her kids after her husband is sent off to prison. The inscription on her stone reads, in part, “To this generation I would say / Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty / It may serve a turn in your life.” This exactly defines the imperative of George Gray’s story.

George Gray’s poem is a cautionary tale, as much a warning as hard-earned advice. George offers advice on how to live, ironically, as he is someone who decided not to truly live. Learn from my regret, George Gray argues. Read my tombstone and learn from it what I never did: “To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness / But life without meaning is the torture” (14). There can be no more ironic word spoken by a resident of the limbo of an afterlife than the word “now”—now, George Gray admits in Line 10, now I see what I should have done, how I should have lived. Because George Gray never shares the elements of his life—his relationships, his career, his family, his expectations, his decisions, his dreams—he is given to us as starkly alone, apart, left for an eternity to mull over what might have been, where (to borrow from his increasingly ironic metaphor for his life) his sailboat might have ventured. It was a life without regrets because he never did much to regret.

As he contemplates the carving on his own tombstone—a sailboat in the harbor, a traditional symbol of a life well spent, and now the person gratefully, happily embracing life in the harbor that is the calm of death—George Gray realizes the irony of the symbol. Rather than suggest the life well-lived, in his case the sailboat in the harbor only reminds him of what he never did, of what he refused to do. Love? He denied it, certain, without any quantitative data, that all love must end in disillusionment. Ambition? Although he never defines his actual career, he spent his time resisting the opportunity to advance, to take on new challenges, to break through and head out into new horizons, certain only that grasp will always exceed reach. And finally he turned his heart from the experience of sorrow, the pain of a heart struggling to make sense of emotional torment. It was easier to feel no pain, to never cry. He realizes now that a human being, to be a human being, needs the experience of sorrow as well as joy, agony as well as happiness. Sorrow, then, like love and success, marks the life lived.

A creature of the intellect, George Gray figures out early on that if every person suffers as a consequence of love, ambition, and pain, he can protect his heart by avoiding such messy emotions. In a sense, George Gray passively embraces death even in life, in self-defense. To protect his heart, he destroys it. The logic is both coaxing and damning.

The poem entirely changes within the premise of Masters’ collection. George Gray is not offering advice to his friends and family. This is no deathbed epiphany. This is no Scrooge-at-the-casement-window tipping point, a time for a life-reboot. George Gray speaks from the grave. There is no lavish heaven, nor even the fires of the Christian Hell. There is just a solitary soul left for an eternity to ponder how he himself created the regrets he now contemplates. The poem teaches the value of dreaming by revealing the cost paid for avoiding such recklessness. The poem counsels the wisdom of risk the only way risk can be fully appreciated: by those who opt never to chance it.

In the end, most people might have regrets, mistakes in judgment, things they should not have done, moments that lead to deep, heavy consequences. Masters points out how sad it is, in fact, not to have such regrets but rather to struggle with the realization that such regrets, ultimately, gift life its color, its dimension, its depth. “Catch the winds of destiny,” George counsels us dramatically, “wherever they drive the boat” (Lines 11-12). Too late for him, perhaps, but not too late for us. In this, George Gray is less Scrooge and more like Jacob Marley, the forbidding specter who first demands that Scrooge change. In this, for all the touches of the grave about him, George Gray offers redemption, not for himself but for the reader.