of the aster flower he writes, “I packed it into the thoracic cavity / with
the excelsior / when he was sewn up. / Drink your fill in your vase! /
Rest easy, / little aster!” (Benn 10-15). The narration of the performed
autopsy is apathetic, going through the motions of the procedure without
consideration to the life the dead body once held. But, the narrator
addresses the aster as though it is sentient, taking care to ensure it
remains well hydrated and safe within the corpse. The phrase “Rest easy”
is said with an exclamation, encouraging this flower with excitement and
obvious care in contrast to the usage of scientific jargon when referring
to the body parts of the deceased man. Regardless of the affection given
to the aster, it is still not presented in physical terms and Benn forgoes a
description of its beauty. The worth of the flower is imbued through the
care given in the language of the mortician rather than in its aesthetic
value as presented by its natural image. As a reader used to poetry
which capitalized on physical aesthetics, this struck me as poignantly
bizarre.
Benn focuses heavily on action within his poems rather than physical
descriptors, shifting the question from ‘what is it?’ to ‘what is it doing?’
and ‘why is it doing this?’. His subject in Little Aster matters little when
evaluated as simply a flower in a dead body; this image is off-putting and
does not hold deeper value from a direct standpoint. In order to create
something which contains aesthetic merit without merely describing it
through its physical features, Benn had to remove the connection from
the words he was using to their denotative meaning. “Innerworldly
experiences resist language not merely negatively but essentially in
that they resist full or unconditioned discursivity, the linguistic exchange
of meaning without remainder”, and through poetry Benn could sever
and reimagine the link between the image he was presenting and the
meaning he wanted to get across (Bernstein 1991: 13). “Little Aster”
is important for what it is saying about humanity at the time of Benn’s
writing. Its merit can be found in the conclusions drawn from reflecting
on something disturbing which people are likely to avoid within the safety
of their own heads. As I reflected on the emotions of Germans during
the world wars, Little Aster helped to reveal the indifferent attitudes that
resulted from mass human death. Surrounded by tragedy the European
medical examiners, soldiers, and citizens all had the potential to become
numb to individual instances of horror. But, the aster is a flower, a symbol
of hope and life. While its insertion into a dead body is disconcerting, it
works to show the triumph of nature over human suffering, and could
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