ELEGY:LAMENT, PRAISE, CONSOLATION

Read: 13 Ways, Chapter 4, "Elegies and Aubaudes" as well as Elegy poems in SM.

In Jeanne Larsen's book, Why We Make Gardens, read: 
“The Grass Withereth, the Flower Fadeth” ( 23), “The Garden of Age,” (24), “Garden of Destruction,” (32), “In Virginia,” (41).  What kinds of losses, grief, regret, sorrow, and rebirth, do these poems express?  Look at how Larsen’s use of language helps her craft elegiac tones.


The Academy of American Poets defines elegies:

The elegy began as an ancient Greek metrical form and is traditionally written in response to the death of a person or group. Though similar in function, the elegy is distinct from the epitaph, ode, and eulogy: the epitaph is very brief; the ode solely exalts; and the eulogy is most often written in formal prose.
 
The elements of a traditional elegy mirror three stages of loss. First, there is a lament, where the speaker expresses grief and sorrow, then praise and admiration of the idealized dead, and finally consolation and solace.

One of the most famous American elegies was written by Walt Whitman, upon the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Notice how Whitman includes the final stage of "consolation and solace," while still allowing a sense of devastation that cannot be assuaged:

O Captain! my Captain!
 

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
2 O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
3 My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

For this and other elegies (often poems about funerals), see the AAP site . Incidentally, while Whitman's poem was understandably popular at the time, and remains so, Whitman felt it was not one of his best efforts. He rarely wrote in rhyme, and felt the popularity of this piece misrepresented his body of work in general.

Elegies do not always follow the three stages listed above; as you read through some of the elegies in our anthologies and online, notice how each poet negotiates the difficulty of grieving, praising, and coming to resolution.

An elegy is not always about individual people; elegies have been written for pets, for love affairs, for ecological losses, for lost parts of selves, for the end of an era.

Paula Meehan writes about the loss of open spaces in her poem, "Death of a Field."  (click on the link to see Paula read this poem).  She makes use of lists here in an elegy about a kind of death that ripples from the very smallest being to the much larger ecosystem and human communities. Her use of contrast is striking: "the end of primrose is the start of Brillo" puts the delicacy of a flower next to the rough artificial brutality of a cleaning pad, and forces us as readers to face the reality of this loss. 


DEATH OF A FIELD

                 By Paula Meehan

The field itself is lost the morning it becomes a site
When the Notice goes up: Fingal County Council – 44 houses

The memory of the field is lost with the loss of its herbs

Though the woodpigeons in the willow
And the finches in what’s left of the hawthorn hedge
And the wagtail in the elder
Sing on their hungry summer song

The magpies sound like flying castanets

And the memory of the field disappears with its flora:
Who can know the yearning of yarrow
Or the plight of the scarlet pimpernel
Whose true colour is orange?

And the end of the field is the end of the hidey holes
Where first smokes, first tokes, first gropes
Were had to the scentless mayweed

The end of the field as we know it is the start of the estate
The site to be planted with houses each two or three bedroom
Nest of sorrow and chemical, cargo of joy

The end of dandelion is the start of Flash
The end of dock is the start of Pledge
The end of teazel is the start of Ariel
The end of primrose is the start of Brillo
The end of thistle is the start of Bounce
The end of sloe is the start of Oxyaction
The end of herb robert is the start of Brasso
The end of eyebright is the start of Fairy

Who amongst us is able to number the end of grasses
To number the losses of each seeding head?

I’ll walk out once
Barefoot under the moon to know the field
Through the soles of my feet to hear
The myriad leaf lives green and singing
The million million cycles of being in wing

That – before the field become solely map memory
In some archive of some architect’s screen
I might possess it or it possess me
Through its night dew, its moon white caul
Its slick and shine and its prolifigacy
In every wingbeat in every beat of time

In a similar manner, Margaret Atwood writes an elegy for giant tortoises, an endangered species.  But is this poem really just for tortoises?  Is there a larger loss being expressed by Atwood?

ELEGY FOR THE GIANT TORTOISES

by Margaret Atwood

Let others pray for the passenger pigeon
the dodo, the whooping crane, the eskimo:
everyone must specialize
I will confine myself to a meditation
upon the giant tortoises
withering finally on a remote island.
I concentrate in subway stations,
in parks, I can’t quite see them,
they move to the peripheries of my eyes
but on the last day they will be there;
already the event
like a wave traveling shapes vision:
on the road where I stand they will materialize,
plodding past me in a straggling line
awkward without water

their small heads pondering
from side to side, their useless armour
sadder than tanks and history,

in their closed gaze ocean and sunlight paralyzed,
lumbering up the steps, under the archways
toward the square glass altars
where the brittle gods are kept,
the relics of what we have destroyed.
Our holy and obsolete symbols.

from SELECTED POEMS 1965-1975)

And of course, there are humorous or sarcastic elegies, like this one by John Ciardi:

ELEGY FOR JOG

Stiff-dog death, all froth on a bloody chin,
sniffs at the curb. Skinny-man death, his master,
opens the traffic's hedge to let him in.
Jog was his name, silliness his disaster.
He wasn't satisfied to scare the truck:
he had to bite the tire. Fools have no luck. 


As you read the assigned elegies:

1. notice where each of the three stages fall;
2. notice the speaker's choice of nouns, verbs, and tone towards the departed;
3. notice who or what the "departed" is - a person? a lover? a relative? a pet? an era?
4. notice how the departed is remembered: as a complicated human being? as a simplified, stereotypical image? specific memories of the departed?

While free-writing, try the exercises in 13 Ways.  In addition, attempt these exercises:

•  imagine grief as an animal, vegetable, mineral, particular kind of person, thing, event.  See Denise Levertov's poem in SM, ""Talking to Grief" (31).
• an imitation of someone else's elegy;
• a humorous elegy for the "death" of a relationship, food that has spoiled, a favorite t-shirt that has finally disintegrated, a lost shoe;
• a list poem (list the good and bad qualities of the departed, what you miss, what is now possible, what you hope for in the new situation);
• try writing out a list of all the things that can be lost in a typical lifetime. Use the phrase "I lost" and keep going. People lose their minds, their train of thought, their keys, their dogs, their virginity...
• borrow a technique from a poet's elegy. For example, Paula Meehan's contrast repetition: "the end of ___________ is the start of __________." Endings and beginnings are, indeed, intimately related, although in elegaic fashion, it is the ending we mourn. What beginnings, good or bad, might also be a part of ending?

IMPORTANT POINT:  

In your revisions of free writes and drafts, think about all the ways each poet has made his or her elegy belong to their loss, their grief, their specific situation. References to specific eras, time, place, cultural or regional information, personal favorites (songs, food, religion, physical characteristics) all help transform a "typical" elegy into YOUR elegy.  Take care not to fall into comfortable or familiar patterns.  Take risks by writing about something you have not yet written about.  This means, no elegies to Jack Daniels, or mournful poems about the last drop of beer in the fridge, no grieving over that last hangover, etc.  What are you REALLY afraid to write about??  Go there.