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The elegy and its many faces

[Part 1 ]

The elegy, as a poetic form, is found in most societies. Broadly speaking, it is a form of lyric poetry that deals with death and loss. Like architecture and sculpture, the elegy, in most cultures, has had funerary origins. In the next few columns I wish to examine the elegy as a poetic form from a comparative perspective. I plan to begin with a general description of the elegy as a mode of creative expression, and explore its growth in the English poetic tradition which includes its American development as well. After that I propose to focus on the nature and significance of elegiac poetry in Asian counties such as India and Japan. Finally, I will investigate into the ways in which the elegy has made its presence in Sinhala literature, both classical and modern. Here it is my intention to focus on classical texts such as the Kavsilumina, and modern poetry of writers such as Munidasa Cumaratunga, Sagara Palansuriya, Gunadasa Amarasekera and Siri Gunasinghe.

In my discussion, I would like to pay close attention to Munidasa Cumaratunga’s Piya Samara as an exemplary instance of a Sinhala elegy. Unfortunately, this work has not yet received the kind of widespread critical admiration it richly deserves. Martin Wickramasinghe and Gunadasa Amarasekera have been championing this work for some time in the face of the stony silence of the local critical establishment. I must confess I myself was rather slow to warm up to the poem. This was largely because I sensed a certain archaic ring to its language in general.

However, when once one clears that hurdle one is bound to appreciate the complex narrative structure and the challenging psycho-poetics of the poem. Cumaratunga, to be sure, was no stranger to English elegiac poetry.

The elegy for the most part deals with death, personal loss as well as with reflections on the tragic dimensions of life. What is interesting about this mode of literary expression is that the unbearable emotions that express themselves as lament find consolation in the poetic process and the end product which is the poem itself.

The term elegy is derived from a Greek term; in Greek literature the tem elegy signified lyric poems reconfiguring death and loss as well as, stylistically speaking, a couplet consisting of a hexameter followed by a pentameter.

With the passage of time, the elegy assumed different shapes in Greek literature as well as in other modern European literatures.

The elegy as a poetic form bears certain similarities to other poetic forms like epitaph, ode and eulogy. However there are important differences that we need to bear in mind. The epitaph constitutes a brief statement; the ode is largely celebratory in nature; the eulogy, for the most part, is written in prose. Traditionally the elegy consisted of three stages of poetic expansion of emotion. In the first stage the poet is perturbed by the loss of a person and laments his or her death. In the second sage, there is a focus on the virtues and admirable qualities of the deceased and to point out he or she stood above the rest. In the third stage one observes the poet arriving at a point of consolation and solace and the very writing of the poem paving the way for the realisation of this objective.

The Greek and Latin elegies gave way to Italian, French, German and English elegies. Let me briefly touch on the English elegiac tradition of poetry. There were some attempts being made in Renaissance England, as evidenced in the work of such poets as Spenser and Sidney to emulate the formal patterns of Greek elegy, but not with conspicuous success. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England, the term elegy was deployed as a capacious term to cover Petrarchan love poetry as well as various forms of laments in verse. However, the linkage between elegy and death, which we have now come to recognize as its defining feature, began to emerge largely as a consequence of the production of what is referred to as funeral elegies. In John Donne’s An Anatomy of the World, one sees the power and appeal of the funeral elegy.

Another form of poetry that served to strengthen the voice of the elegy and give it depth significance is the pastoral elegy. What happens here is the displacement of personal sorrow engendered by death and loss into an ideal pastoral landscape with shepherds and flowers.

It is important to bear in mind in this regard that one of the earliest understandings of the elegy was as a flute song. Milton’s Lycidas has stood the test of time as one of the finest elegies in the English language.

It is a pastoral elegy. Milton’s work had the effects of establishing the elegy as a significant and vibrant form of literary expression. It is indeed a poem heavy with meaning, clouded with mystery and rising to the highest levels of literary art on the wings of imagination. I will discuss Milton’s Lycidas as an elegy in my subsequent columns.

The elegy in English was nurtured by such diverse talents as Thomas Gray (Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard), Samuel Johnson (Vanity of Human wishes), Alexander Pope (Elegy on the Death of an Unfortunate Lady), Alfred Lord Tennyson (In Memoriam), Percy Bysshe Shelley (Adonais). In more recent times poets such as Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, W,H, Auden, Robert Lowelsucceeded in diverse ways in expanding, strengthening and subverting this tradition. I plan to discuss some their work later.

What I wish to do now is to focus on the discourse of the elegy and to point out how certain productive dualities are at work in elegies. The elegy primarily deals with mourning of the death of the person. The concept of the ‘working of mourning’ that Freud discussed can be usefully pressed into service in understanding the discourse of the elegy. Freud saw this as a complex process that involved human emotions, rationality and cultural understandings. One central duality in the elegies is that of loss and figuration. The elegy marks the death of its protagonist, and the objective of the poet is to give it vivid and cogent figuration.

The poet has to create a symbolic world in which the experiences of loss and the experiences of literary figuration are kept in fruitful tension. The way in which this tension is managed differs from poet to poet and one can clearly observe this when we compare the respective strategies of, say, Shelley in Adonais and Cumaratunga in Piya Samara.

Tension

This tension is tied to the question of language, the shock of the death of the protagonist and how it is expressed, modulated, controlled by the language employed by the poet. This is indeed an important phenomenon that characterises the elegy and unfortunately one that has as yet not received the kind of sustained and nuanced attention that it merits. As Peter M Sacks who has done important work in this field accurately observed, ‘One of the least well observed elements of the genre is the enforced accommodation between the mourning self on the one hand and the very words of grief and fictions of consolation on the other.’

Another important duality that marks elegies is the interplay between the personal and impersonal, particular and the universal, attachment and detachment. The elegy pivots around the death of a person, and that loss causes great emotional stress in the poet. At the same time, in composing a poem, that emotion has to be universalised in some fashion. It is here that the intersections of the personal and the impersonal assume such significance in elegiac poetry. In the case of pastoral elegies, the elegists succeed in securing that much needed impersonality by displacing the experience on to the pastoral world of shepherds and flutes. Here we find an interesting inter-animation of self-expression and self-suppression that characterises many of the most memorable elegies.

Another important duality that fuels elegies is the intersections of change and permanence, mundane and transcendental. Most elegies start from a real life experience of death – the death of a child, a parent, siblingr, wife, friend, leader etc. It clearly bears the stamp of its historical moment of origin. For example, John Milton’s Lycidas was written to commemorate the death of his friend Edward King. However, if the poem remained solely at the level of immediacy and particularity it is hardly likely to rise to the level of sophisticated literary art. For that to happen, the elegist should be able to transcend the immediacies of the experience and attain to a kind of universality. This is precisely what we observe in the conspicuously successful elegies of poets ranging from Milton and Shelley to Yeats and Lowell. Different poets deploy different rhetorical strategies to achieve this end. It is important that we as students of literature focus on this effort.

Repetition

When we examine the elegies written in the West as well as in the East, a fact that emerges with mounting force is the importance of repetition as a poetic device; This repetition is constitutive of meaning and not a mere embellishment. The idea of repetition appears in different registers of the elegy. First, there is formal repetition. For example, scholars have pointed out that in the elegies by Theocritus regarded as the work that in many ways initiated this genre, contains repetitions of earlier poetry. Therefore, repetition in elegies tends to reinforce a sense of continuity with earlier works. This sense of continuity, the unbroken flow is significant as a consolatory strategy because death – the ostensible subject of the elegy – has a way of focusing on discontinuity and rupture. However, repetition generates its opposite, namely, the uniqueness. This binary is another that characterises elegies.

The repetitions that one finds in elegies are also important in terms of their psychic values. Psychologists have pointed out that repetition can become a protective psychological response to trauma. The re-narration of the event through the activation of memory and imagination has the effect of easing the tension. For example, let us consider the statement: ‘I weep for Adonis; lovely Adonis is dead. Dead is lovely Adonis; the lovers join in weeping.’ As one critic has observed, ‘by such repetition, the mind seeks retroactively to create the kind of protective barrier that, had it been present at the actual event, might have prevented or softened the disruptive shock that initially caused the trauma.’

In terms of poetic narration, the repetition performs a dual function – it enables the forward movement of the poem; at the same time it plays an important role in managing and controlling the articulation of grief which is the motor force of the poem. This duality, then, invites our focused attention.

Interplay

The interplay between mourning and melancholy that Freud discussed in his seminal essay has a bearing on repetitions in elegies. When the griever mourns the death of a person it is important that he or she be steadfastly persuaded by the fact of death. If there is an unwillingness to accept that fact, mourning can turn into melancholy. As Freud remarked, ‘melancholy is in some way related to an unconscious loss of a love-object, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing unconscious about the loss.’ In order for mourning not to slide into melancholy, it is important that the griever should be constantly reminded about the fact of death and loss. Repetition as a verbal strategy plays a crucial role in this effort of gaining recognition for the bereavement.

Speaking of melancholy, I made the following observation in my book Ashes of Time published by the Hong Kong University Press, As opposed to melancholia, ‘The diminishment of self-regard is absent in mourning.’ In this context, I wish to make what I think is a highly germane point; it is that in more modern elegies, as opposed to traditional ones, there is a greater tendency to lean towards the melancholy. This is because the absolute certitude, the unwavering sureness of focus that characterised classical elegies have given way to self-doubt self-questioning and self-impeachment in keeping with modern, and even post-modern trends of thinking.

The interplay between repetition and uniqueness that one encounters in elegies in general is a phenomenon that is complex, multi-faceted and hence needing careful de-coding. In this regard, I wish to refer to the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze who in my judgment has undertaken some of the most innovative work into the concept of repetition. According to him, repetition does not represent a cyclical movement. What returns in repetition is not the identical, but a different version of it. Repetition is recognition of difference. The title of his magisterial work on this subject is Difference and Repetition. As he argues what returns in repetition is somewhat different from itself. He said that, ‘The subject of the eternal return is not the same but the different, not the similar but the dissimilar, not the one but the many.’ This indeed is a formulation that invites close attention. As Deleuze put in tersely, ‘Difference inhabits repetition.’

Implication

This approach to repetition has significant implication for the understanding of elegy as a poetic form. It is important to bear in mind the fact that in elegies the commonly found representational strategy of repetition has to be understood in its full and manifold complexity. To the best of my knowledge, this is a topic that has not yet received the kind of critical gaze it clearly deserves.

Another interesting duality that one can discern in elegies in general is the interplay between displacement and replacement. The immediate subject of an elegy is the death if a child, parent, friend, relative, public figure etc. But what the elegist through his or her willed art, conscious literary imagination, does is to create an important artifice out of that mortality. To be sure, not all poets succeed in this effort. However it is indeed the desired aim in general. Thus there is a clear displacement; a person has been displaced from life. It is this displacement that generates the sorrow and ensuing lament. However, the elegist does not stop here; he or she seeks to rise above the situation and create a memorable work of art. This has to be seen as an act if replacement. The work of art, representing the life of the deceased, becomes a substitute for him or her.

As one surveys the growth of elegy as a poetic form, one witnesses the emergence of self-doubts, self-disparagements, self-divisions. In elegies written by modern poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz aqnd Allen Ginsberg one observes this arc of feeling. This is, of course, not to suggest that the sight of self-reproach and self-diminution was totally absent from traditional elegies. This is certainly not the case. In an elegy like Tennyson’s In Memoriam one can clearly see this desire. However, in modern times, beginning with poets like Thomas Hardy, we see the increasing presence of self-reproach, even occupying a pre-eminent place, in elegiac writings.

The elegy, like any other poetic form, has evolved over time jettisoning certain features and absorbing others. This is indeed a mark of a living poetic form. For example, many modern elegies written mainly by American poets contain an unsettling tone of denunciation of the protagonist. This is a trait that is scarcely found in traditional elegies. For example, in elegies written on their parents, American poets such as Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylivia Plath and Anne Sexton adopt a denunciatory tone. It is instructive to compare this with a poem like the Piya Samara by Munidasa Cumaratunga which is also an elegy on his father. Moreover, in certain cases, worrisome guilt enters the imagination of the elegists. It is almost as if by writing on a certain deceased person the poet is seen as exploiting an unfortunate situation for personal fame.

Admiration

In modern times, the traditional elegy which was seen as a tomb of respect for a dead person has at times become a site of contestation where contradictory feelings of admiration and denigration meet each other in an environment full of tension and uncertainty. Another interesting aspect of more recent developments in elegy as a poetic form is the engagement with the death not only of the protagonist but also the possible demise of the elegy form itself. This indeed has great implications for the modern expansions of the elegy.

In order to attain a truer understanding of the nature and significance of the modern elegy we need to situate it in its proper social and cultural context; we need to bring into the equation the changes in social mourning and how it influences poetic mourning. The once elaborate and prolonged ceremonies and rituals and commemorative activities associated with mourning have been simplified, streamlined and abbreviated under modern social pressures. This had a complex effect on poetic mourning – the composition of elegies.

Jahan Ramzani who has done some important work in re-imaging the elegy makes the following apposite observation. ’While mourners were discarding many of the ‘trappings and the suits of woe’, poets were trimming their elegies of flower catalogues, mourning processions, and conventional reversals. Yet their production of numerous elegies indicates that that they were not merely mimicking the decline in the mourning ritual but also struggling against it. Indeed, they reclaimed, redefined, and reinvigorated poetic mourning at the historical moment when social meaning was dwindling.’ There is a very interesting dualistic interplay between the social coding of mourning and poetic coding of mourning. If we take an example from Sri Lanka, the common practice of publishing a sheet of poem to mark the sad occasion – ‘shoka prakashaya – illustrates this interaction between social and poetic codifications of mourning.

Relationship

When discussing the elegy there is a widespread tendency to focus solely on the interpersonal dimensions – the relationship between the poet and the object of the elegy. While the personal dimension is indubitably important, we need to bear in mind that most elegies, both traditional and modern, gain their density when seen against the larger social issues that they point to. For example, in the elegies of Thomas Hardy one senses his unease with the passing of the rural environment and in W.B.Yeats’ elegies a nostalgia for a lost aristocratic order.

As the elegy evolved over time, it gave rise to different forms such as pastoral elegy - family elegy – self elegy – mock elegy – pre elegy and counter elegy. In subsequent columns I propose to discuss some of these sub-genres. What I have sought to do in this column is to discuss the growth of the elegy within the English literary tradition (including the American) as a way of creating a useful background against which we could explore the uniqueness of Asian elegies including Indian, Japanese, Chinese and, of course, Sri Lankan creations.

 

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