Elegy and silence

It's a truism to say that the impulse to write an elegy is a pretty universal one. Perhaps not for every individual but certainly in every culture and language and nationality. Despite its reputation for elitism, there still seems to be an instinctive need to voice certain human experiences in the pattern of a poem. This is regardless of class, literary background or the lack of (access to) one. At times of celebration - a wedding, say - and even more powerfully at times of grief and loss. So Jack Tweed reads his poem at his wife Jade Goody's funeral, addressing her, voicing his grief, and attempting a sense of resolution in depicting her as a star in the night sky. Not an original image but still a literal/symbolic evocation of the universe and the elements.

In fact the pattern of his poem is pretty traditional, albeit unconsciously so. Although originally a term for poetic metre, an elegy (from the Greek) is defined as a poem of mourning, a reflection on the death of someone or on sorrow generally. The first such literary encounter I remember was with Classical Roman poet Catullus's poem 101 (what odd subsequent allusions that number has). Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. Hail and Farewell: his brother acknowledged in a last greeting, which then turns, on such a small verbal conjuntion, to a final farewell. As teenagers we studied the text in Latin class in High School, gradually and painstakingly acquiring the skills to translate it, but most of us fortunate enough to find no particular resonance in the phrases.

In English language poetry there are some powerful divergences from the general expectation of an elegy. Tichborne's 'Elegy' for instance, mourning his own life on the eve of his execution in 1586. The three stanza poem is packed full of Elizabethan-style opposites and antitheses, with a strong, monosyllabic (as is most of the poem) refrain line closing each one. Here's the final stanza:

I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

Then there's Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' of 1750 - well plundered for quotations of course, and significant in its anticipation of the the poetic shift from elegant Augustan to Nature-infused-with-wonder Romanticism. Interestingly the poem was originally entitled 'Stanzas...' rather than 'Elegy...' which in way better indicates its broad subject matter, its generalised contemplation of mortality.

In general though an elegy would involve mourning of a particular person. Often another poet, such as John Keats, addressed in Shelley's 'Adonais'. The life or essence of the deceased would be evoked and the pain of grief acknowledged. But the poem would traditionally close with a return to the world of the living, a re-starting at least of the processes of hope. 'Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new', as Milton's 'Lycidas' concludes.

Perhaps this sense of tentative resolution is easier to include in an elegy at times of more religious certainty, more homogenised cultural practise and belief; perhaps not. But contemporary poets can find the elegy problematic. W S Merwin's 'Elegy' is the definitive one line expression of grief:

Who would I show it to

Such a resonant line. That repeating vowel sound in 'who', 'would', 'to' to me sums up ts obvious answering rhyme, so very painfully absent: 'you'. The 'oh' in 'show' is like an echoing utterance of despair. The concluding line to the suggested poetic couplet, the answer to the question - all gone. Space and silence the only response.

It's difficult to know how such an acknowledgement of unanswered questions, of absence, could be developed further. A careful prolongation of space and pause, perhaps - I was intrigued by the (forgive the sci fi ref) alien 'Doosodarians' in Star Trek were imagined to write elegaic poetry which included extended lacunaue; timed periods of both silence and blank screen, in which poet and reader/audience could experience emptiness and absence.

Two other ways to use the form which I've noticed. I'm sure there are more as this is a vast subject. The first is a further use of paradox, only the discomforting paradox that dream-based consolatory appearances by the dead (and I've had these myself) equally echo the compassion of the departed and the self-comforting urge of one's own psyche - Thom Gunn's short poem 'The Reassurance', one of the many powerful poems he wrote during the AIDs epidemic of the 1980s, concludes: 'How like you to be kind/ seeking to reassure/ and yes, how like my mind/ to make itself secure.' We find it difficult these days to take consoling signs as anything other than self-generated. (And yet.)

Then is still sometimes a sense of something continuing, if only in other elements - we're back to the star in the sky, among other symbols. A reverting to the universal, even in literary elegy. Ammons' 'Mansion' for instance which starts with

So it came time
for me to cede myself
and I chose
the wind
to be delivered to

And - I'm ending this post on an incomplete note because there's a Denise Levertov poem that I'm trying to find but can't - it depicts the subject of her elegy, the woman who has died, gradually relaxing into a pool of warm water with a sigh of relief - as though it is the welcoming, universal element which welcomes and transforms her even at the moment of dissolution - of dissolving, in fact. I think it's from 'Breathing the Water' and I only have a selected Levertov here, so I'll have to follow that up. But fitting that these elements of air and water should still be invoked to bear the flow of grief when the landscape of elegy is itself now so elusive and fluid.