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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