On John Updike's "Creeper"

John Updike (Photo by Michael O'Neill)

As a result of reading Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour, I find myself thinking about the meaning of John Updike’s “Creeper,” the ninth in a ten-poem sequence called “Endpoint” that originally appeared in the March 16, 2009, New Yorker. The poem figures centrally in Roiphe’s portrait of Updike’s death. She calls it “a lovely, wishful expression of an accepting stance toward dying, a new, late iteration of stoicism.” But it seems to me that “Creeper” expresses more than just acceptance of death. It appears to treat death as “good”:

With what stoic delicacy does

Virginia creeper let go:

the feeblest tug brings down

a sheaf of leaves kite-high,

as if to say, To live is good

but not to live—to be pulled down

with scarce a ripping sound,

still flourishing, still

stretching toward the sun—

is good also, all photosynthesis

abandoned, quite quits. Next spring

the hairy rootlets left unpulled

snake out a leafy afterlife

up that same smooth-barked oak.

I love the image of the Virginia creeper “letting go” as a symbol of death. It captures life’s fragility. But I balk at the idea that it is “good” to be pulled down – “all photosynthesis / abandoned, quite quits.” That is going beyond stoical acceptance. Yes, death is part of life. But it’s also an extinguishment of life. There’s nothing good about it.