Writing the elegy (9.25.19)

Elegy is as much mood as mode for the practicing poet.  It is feeling first, as E.E. Cummings said, and it is feeling last.  

The name comes from the Greek word elegeia, for "lament."  My Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines the term as a "lyric, usually formal in tone and diction, suggested either by the death of an actual person or by the poet's contemplation of the tragic aspects of life."  In other words, an emotion is prompted by an external event (someone's passing) or by introspection (the tragedy of life).  Whichever source, the Encyclopedia goes on to describe, the emotion "finds consolation in the contemplation of some permanent principle."

The first thing to note about elegy, in the Encyclopedia's terms, is that it is a lyric form, that is, not dramatic, epic, or narrative, but song.  We can extend that distinction: the elegy is never merely ironic or satirical.  Where irony's indirectness suggests cynicism, or a kind of fatalism, elegy's lament is often more direct and unfeigned.  Where satire points to a wrong in society that must be righted, elegy points to a truth, a "fact of life."

Typically, elegies don't develop plot or characters (as plays and novels do); they don't unfold over vast spans of space and time (The Iliad, The Aeneid); they are not symphonic (Song of Myself).  Like love poems, elegies sing intense emotions and address intimate topics.  Reading them, you should feel not like you're at a performance of King Lear or watching Apocalypse Now on the big screen, but listening in to an anguished soul in private, one on one.  You are experiencing a moment (with someone).

The second thing to note is that the death or "sad but true fact of life" that occasions an elegy is not the subject of the elegy.  It is the departure point where the real subject is the poet's feeling about these things.  Someone important to you dies--say a relative, a mentor, a friend, a beloved public figure.  Your elegy explores the meaning of that loss, to you and/or to your coterie or fellow citizens, etc.  If you write a poem that merely celebrates the deceased's life, you have created a eulogy, not an elegy.  Or you come upon a robin dead in your front yard.  Your elegy explores the life cut short, the vanity of human endeavor, the provisional nature of life, etc.  If you write a poem that merely describes the dead bird, you have created possibly a deep and abiding image, but not an elegy.

And the third thing to note in the Encyclopedia's definition is that it leads somewhere; it finds consolation.  So the best way to understand elegy as a writer of poetry is that you set out to make yourself feel better about some incontrovertible fact of life: someone's died, something's died, the center cannot hold, life is loss, etc.  That is to say, elegy seeks and elegy finds.  Or attempts to find.  

But is that all, just feeling?  Is there craft to elegy?  If you set out to write an elegy (spoiler alert!), where do you go after feeling?  How do you know that what you're writing isn't really something else?  And what does "lament" look like in poetic practice?

I have no answers to these questions.  Which is what makes me think this is a great project for us at Wednesdays@One--to try to discover the form by trying to write one.  Below are a few very basic guidelines (they're not rules, really) and some examples to get you started.  Have fun!

Guidelines

1.  Keep your poem short, to a single page or less, if you can, and make it meditative.
2.  Choose a subject: that person whose passing made you (still makes you?) stop and think about what was lost or what that death meant to you or your community.  Remember, try not to write an encomium or eulogy--your poem isn't really about that person, but what that person's death means.  Alternatively, choose something like that dead bird in your garden, or the abandoned house down the road, or the polar bear (whose extinction seems more and more likely), or Earth (whose extinction seems more and more likely), or Troy or democracy . . .  But remember this: you want to write an elegy, a lyric, not a political or religious diatribe, not a satire on Man's Folly, etc.  You want to use the subject to explore not just how you feel, but how to feel appropriately about the subject.
3.  Find consolation, if consolation is to be found.  (Such as, this is how I ought to feel about this loss, death, fact of life, etc.)  That is, seek wisdom in the elegy, even if it's the most mundane kind of wisdom. That is, direct your poem to somewhere, make it move.

For W_____, Who Commanded Well, by Howard Nemerov

You try to fix your mind upon his death,
Which seemed it might, somehow, be relevant
To something you once thought, or did, or might
Imagine yourself thinking, doing. When?

It was, once, the most possible of dreams:
The hero acted it, philosophers
Could safely recommend it to the young;
It was acceptable, a theme for a song.

And it was wrong? Daily the press commends
A rationed greed, the radio denies
That war is right, or wrong, or serious:
And money is being made, and the wheels go round,
And death is paying for itself: and so
It does not seem that anything was lost.

Elegy for Jane, by Theodore Roethke

(My student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;

And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

And how, once started into talk, the light syllables leaped for her.

And she balanced the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,

Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.

The shade sang with her;

The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,

And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,

Even a father could not find her:

Scraping her cheek against straw,

Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here, 

Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.

The sides of wet stones cannot console me,

Nor the moss, would with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,

My mained darling, my skittery pigeon.

Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:

I, with no rights in this matter,

Neither father nor lover.

For a Coming Extinction, by W. S. Merwin

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand

And I could say it

One must always pretend something

Among the dying

When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks

Empty of you 

Tell him that we were made

On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo

Winding along your inner mountains

unheard by us

And find its way out

Leaving behind it the future

Dead

And ours

When you will not see again

The whale calves trying the light

Consider what you will find in the black garden

And its court

The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas

The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless

And fore-ordaining as stars

Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important


In Memory of Senator Mitch McConnell, by Clark Holtzman

His obituary will read like a victory lap in Lexington,
garlanded with uncontested primaries, steady electoral landslides,
the squeaker after he had to take a tough stand on principle.

His children will wipe tears away as the Reverend,
in full battle dress, recounts the life of noble animosities,
harrowing retrenchments, and they will know

that, but for him, the country might have gone to hell.
That year, the Derby will be raced with him in mind
and the Senate Chaplain, choking back tears of his own,

will eulogize a lion, a pillar, a bulwark, a standard
before a packed chamber and respectful media, silent for once.
That silence will be death's, profound and dumbstruck.

So be it, that a man will see the world in a mirror,
and as only he can see it, as he can only see it:
each of us loves an invention that can only love us back.

So we'll push on into our still new, still strange century,
adjusting our admirations and expectations to the novelty,
and, whatever yesterday was, hope for tomorrow's better day.