Deborah Digges, a poet and Tufts University professor of English, jumped off the top of the University of Massachusetts stadium while the Temple University women’s lacrosse team was practicing there. The team noticed her, “in the upper reaches of the stadium,” but thought little of it, and then they found her body.

She was an accomplished writer. Much of her poetry and prose chronicles the despair behind her suicide. Disillusionment, every reflective person’s experience, undid her.

In a memoir about her troubled son she writes, “I have been a snob, a bohemian snob who believed that the arts, music, poetry were religion enough . . . and that somehow, above all the groups in culture – rich and poor alike – we were superior in our passionate pursuits.”

Reading her, you get the sense of a person extraordinarily bifurcated, unable to overcome the gap between the beliefs and passions upon which she set her life, and the failure of those beliefs and passions.

Here’s one of her strongest poems. Read it first here, without my commentary:

RUNE FOR THE PARABLE OF DESPAIR

Little left of me that year [The poet recalls a terrible year of despair, which almost did her in.]—I had a vision
I was strata, atmosphere. [Little left of her. Mere air.]
Or it was that the host entire coded in my blood
found voice and shrieked, for instance,
at what we now call roads
and I must maneuver freeways, bridges with these inside me
falling to their knees beating the ground howling. [The self-eviscerating despair was so great that her very reality as a self was taken over by a “host” of shrieking creatures.]
One might well ask why they’d come forward—
fugitives flushed from a burning house,
converts fed down the aisles, [Should this be “led” down the aisles? UD isn’t sure – thinks maybe this is a typo…]
bumping and blubbering their way into revival light,
light so eroding, the human face is aberration,
the upright stance a freak
with no means otherwise. [How do I even stay upright under this despair?]

Some things won’t translate backwards.
Some things can’t be undone,
though it takes years to learn this, years. [The pain of recognizing that you’ve made unalterable mistakes in your life.]
Such were the serial exhaustions of my beliefs, [One by one, the convictions on which I grounded my life wore out.]
whatever drug worn off that must belong to youth,
or to the feminine, or simply to the genes begun a wintering.
Then I knew the purest bitterness,
as if my heart were a wrecking ball,
my love for the man an iron bell used of the wind,
calling to task a population,
calling them in, as from these fields,
before the stone wheel became speech,
before fire dropped from the sky to be caged and carried into the caves. [The fire of youthful romantic passion transmutes into an embittering, imprisoning flame.]
And so they came to be with me,

whom I suspect was nothing more to them than shelter,
a ransomed hall, a shipwreck among dead trees,
the fallen branches lichen-studded,
which they dragged into my rooms. [The host again; the sense of her self taken over by morbid aggressive forces of misery.]
And when the lights burned out they wept,
and when the heat was gone they gathered my rugs around them. [Again, even the flame of bitterness burns out eventually, and one is left with cold emptiness.]
I’d never known how quickly a house
can be taken back, taken down,
nor will I grant myself the balm—
though it’s been centuries—
that I was “blessed” to see it turned inside out,
the furniture thrown through the windows, and the books
to lie face up, riffling, swelling, until the pages
emptied into a thousand seasons, [An honest person, she won’t console herself with the facile notion that the total destruction of everything you’ve stood for and the end of your love affair is somehow purgative, clarifying, an energizing challenge to begin anew. She knows better. No pathetic “revival light” for her.]

books that once possessed the magnet pull of stars!
In the end I let them keep the house
the way they wanted, wash from the toilet,
hang yew boughs from the eaves,
my sturdy doors fallen from the hinges,
even my hair commingling with theirs— [She gives herself over to despair, lets everything go. The hosts take her over.]
huge animal clumps a-swirl in the eddies
of spiders’ eggs and broken teeth and cemetery moss and pine needles— [Great list here. Note how good poets can toss together a set of images and have them carry a theme — here, the theme of the dessication of her youthful fertility.]
until not one ornament was left that said I lived,  [Preparing the Christmas theme with which she’ll end here.]
not even a drinking glass
I might have toasted with just as the clouds
shifted, my shadow disappeared,  [Again the ‘little left of me’ theme.]
O, drink from once before my leaving, leaving.
With any luck, I sang, I’ll be in hell by Christmas. [Sardonic final line, anticipating a holiday release of suicide.]

***********
The surprise of dusk come early is from her poem Lilacs.