The elegy and its many faces

Last week I presented a broad picture of the elegy as a significant poetic genre that merits exploration and some of the features associated with it that should command our attention.

Today I wish to discuss four of my favorite English elegies with the intention of demonstrating the suppleness, range and richness of this literary mode of expression. The four elegies that I have selected for discussion are Milton’s Lycidas.

Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Shelley’s Adonais. (There are, to be sure, other elegies that deserve careful study.) All these four elegies in their different ways, and from their distinct vantage points, testify to the vibrancy of this poetic genre.

How these poets juxtapose thoughts darkened by sorrow with the imaginings lighted up by hope invites close attention. It is evident that this juxtaposition operates in ever widening circles of imagination.

The question of time is central to all these four elegies as it is indeed pivotal to most others. In Dry Salvages, T.S. Eliot says, ‘Time the destroyer is time the preserver.’

This is, to be sure, a sentiment echoed in classical Indian thought as well. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Eliot was influenced by Sanskrit thought which he had studied at Harvard in formulating this idea.

This ambivalence of time pulses through all four elegies in different configurations. Time is ephemeral. It comes to symbolize death. But time is also recognized as a healer; the healing referred to in elegies is not one of inducing forgetfulness but rather one of promoting a higher and more focused awareness.

The idea of immortality is an animating force in most elegies. Another way of phrasing this is to say that it is a way of transcending time through time to reach a more elevated consciousness of time.

However, a deconstructionist would argue that time as it heals also has the effect of destroying what it purports to preserve. These complex inner tensions (aporias, to use the term favoared by deconstructionists) will come to light when we examine the four English elegies.

Let's us first consider Milton’s Lycidas which is regarded as one of the finest and most completely realised elegies in the English language. Edward King, one of Milton’s fellow students who had a bright future, was drowned in the Irish Sea in 1637, and the sorrow generated by this tragic event was the primary impulse to writing of Lycidas.

This initial shock gives way to a mood of self-reflection that foregrounds his own possible plight; what if he were to die, like Edward King, without realising his full poetic potentialities and failing to win the fame he so ardently desired. So in that sense one can plausibly argue that Lycidas is as much about Edward King as it is about himself.

It is also a symbolic acknowledgement of the predicament lying in wait to all aspiring artists in general. The gravitas that characterizes the poem as well as its display of willed literary art and technical resourcefulness strengthen this feeling.

Lycidas opens with an assertion that affords us a glimpse into the condition of possibility of the poem.

Yet once more, o ye laurels, and once more,
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never-sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,

The picture we have of the poet here is one of a poet who is dedicated and ambitious. Because he is young, it is important that he has to pluck the berries of his literary art prior to their achieving ripeness.

In a sense the protagonist of the poem is one who goes beyond the figures of Edward King and John Milton to encompass generalized human being given over to creative pursuits; Christian humanism and poetic creativity are productively combined in this iconic model.

Lycidas, as a poem, gains its strength by being framed within the pastoral elegy form that I discussed last week. Indeed, Lycidas can be regarded as one of the greatest pastoral elegies n English, and since the publication of this poem there has been a perceptible slow decline of this sub-genre.

The pastoral mode has enabled Milton to elevate the life of King to a higher plane while gaining a certain rhetorical distance from the tragedy. Lycidas is a complex weave of emotion and tropes.

Deconstructionist critics would find plenty of spaces in the poem to demonstrate the warring signifiers in the poem, the clashes between logic and rhetoric. There are important claims made on behalf of poetry in this elegy which are immediately subverted by its poetic performance.

The idea of song is central of the organisation of the poem. The deceased Lycidas was a shepherd and shepherds are celebrated for their songs. However, there is also recognition of the limits of poetry. As the deconstructive critic Catherine Belsey observes, ‘the poem sees nevertheless to betray an uncertainty about the power of poetry which is not finally resolved’.

Let us consider next Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam. The death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam at the young age of twenty-two impelled Tennyson to write this elegy.

Hallam was a poet, critic and a member of the Cambridge University Apostles; he had a bright future ahead of him. Hallam was Tennyson’s confidant and was engaged to marry his sister. In Memoriam, which Tennyson took over seventeen years to compose is much longer than the typical elegy.

It consisted of 133 individual poems which dealt with various aspects of his friend’s life as well as the troubling issues it generated in the mind of the poet.

In some of the more accomplished passages, we observe Tennyson’s ability to see things with a peculiar clairvoyance and his facility with verbal music.

In Memoriam deals not only with Hallam’s life but also with the struggle to come to terms with that unsettling fact. It raises issues abut doubt and faith and the power of God and the place of man in the universe. The poem ends on a note of affirmation of faith. In Memoriam, unlike most other elegies lacks a taut structure.

It consists of 133 fragments that add up to a complex and unsteady unity. This is, of course, not to suggest that Tennyson does not display a technical virtuosity in this poem; he certainly does.

As a matter of T.S. Eliot whose poetic sensibility was of a very different order from that of Tennyson remarked that, ‘It is In memoriam that Tennyson finds full expression. Its technical merit alone is enough to ensure its perpetuity.’

As I stated earlier, this elegy raises a number of complex issues related to faith and doubt. Once again the attitude of Tennyson to these issues departs considerably from that of Eliot. However, speaking of In Memoriam, Eliot made the following comment.

’It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience.’

Anyone desirous of fathoming the full plenitude of meaning of this long, three-thousand line elegy will have to grapple with these complicated and challenging questions of faith and doubt.

For literary critics with a deconstructive bent of mind an aspect of this poem that might hold a deep interest is the author’s questioning of the efficacy of the medium of language – his very instrument of communication - to capture his true emotions.

The poet says
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within

In words like weeds, I’ll wrap me over
Like coarsest clothes against the cold
But the large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

At the beginning of this column, I said that all four elegies that I am dealing with here display a complex engagement with time – the desire to use time to overcome time in diverse ways.

In addition, In Memoriam contains another layer of significance related to temporality. This elegy was composed over a period of 17 years and there are 133 different lyrics.

What this long elegy enacts is the movement of time through the texture of the poem in a way that is not evident in the other elegies that I am discussing. The sheer length of the elegy and the long period during which it came into fruition has much to do with this fact.

T.S.Eliot, who has an uncanny ability to make authoritative pronouncements that are persuasive, once said that Tennyson is a great poet for reasons that are abundantly clear.

According to him, Tennyson has three qualities which are rarely found together except in the greatest of poets; abundance, variety and complete competence.

In memoriam manifests these qualities in their full strength. In this elegy there are wonderful passages of poetry that are economical and forceful in articulation and combine the life of the particular with the commonalities of emotion as evidenced in the following verses.

Dark house, by which I once more stand
Here in the long unlovely street
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly waiting for a hand.

He is not here, but far away
The noise of life begins again
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the bland day.

The third elegy that I wish to focus on is Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. It is indeed a very popular poem, and is often taught in schools in higher grades. The poem has as is chosen theme the nature of mortality.

The death of Richard West, a friend of Thomas Gray, may have sparked the writing of the poem. But unlike Milton’s Lycidas or Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the elegy does not deal with the death of a single person.

It is a rumination of death in general - the death of ordinary men and women. But at the same time, as the elegy unfolds, it becomes apparent that the poem is also focusing on the anxiety generated in the poet by his own inevitable death. The desire of the poet to be remembered after his death is an impulse that is woven into the fabric of the poem in a subtle way.

The poem begins memorably with a rural day drawing to a close. A curfew bell is ringing, a herd of cattle is making its way across the grass; a farmer is returning home. And the poet is left alone in the gathering darkness in his solitude at dusk to ruminate on life and death. The opening lines set the scene and establish the tone very effectively.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness ad to me.

Here the pet establishes the mood very effectively. Clearly, he has chosen his words very carefully; a word like ‘knell’ with its connotations of death serves to adumbrate the theme of morality that is at the heart of the elegy.

Most readers appreciate Gray’s elegy as a poem that captures a mood effectively and gives expression to a set of universally applicable emotions ad a chain truisms. This is indeed true as far as it goes; however, there are other complex issues in the verbal txture that invite meticulous attention. For example, Gray is drawing on Milton as well as classical traditions of elegy. Let us consider the following stanza

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke,
How jocund did they drive their team afield?
How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke?

Here in order to avoid the monotony, he has chosen to alter the word order by going against the natural flow of the English language, reminding one of Greek and Latin syntax.

The verbal structure of the poem is more complex than appears on the surface. Followers of Drrida and Paul de Man will find the tension in the language between stillness and sound most interesting.

Throughout Gray’s elegy one can observe a conflict between the imperatives of muteness and imperatives of voice.

Gray as the author of this elegy valorizes silence, muteness, even as he achieves voice through his very construction of the poem. It seems to be the energy that drives the poem forward is generated by antitheses such as the following between silence and sound.

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can honor’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or flattery soothe the dull, cold ear of death?

I think this antithesis between silence and sound, muteness and language, signposts an epistemological anxiety confronted by Thomas Gray. In this regard, I was reminded of Eliot’s lines the communication of the dead is tongued with the fire beyond language of the living.

Thomas Gray’s Elegy in Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem that has been subject to diverse interpretation.

William Empson, who was one of the most astute readers of poetry and who was constantly looking out for enabling ambiguities and enriching paradoxes, offered a political reading of it. He commented on the following fourteenth stanza of the poem in political terms.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Empson makes the following remark.’ a gem does not mind being in the cave and a flower prefers not to be picked; we feel that the man is like a flower, as short lived, natural and valuable, and this tricks us into feeling that he is better off without opportunities.’

He then goes on to assert that, ‘the truism of the reflection in the churchyard, the universality and impersonality this gives to the style, claim as if by comparison that we ought to accept the injustice of society as we do the inevitability of death.’ And a more modern critic astutely makes the following observation.‘ Thus in Gray, the egalitarianism of death works to palliate material inequalities among the living.’

On the other hand, New Critics such as Cleanth Brooks have argued that this elegy should be examined in all its verbal complexity and textual intricacy and that the elegy has a highly worked over structure that we ignore at our peril if we are to arrive at a just estimate of the poem.

Thomas Gray’s Elegy then is a poem that has to be examined carefully, paying close attention to its complex verbal organization, to understand its verbal complexity which is constitutive of its meaning.

The fourth elegy that I wish to discuss briefly is Shelley’s Adonais which was written to commemorate the death of his friend and distinguished poet John Keats whose life was cut short prematurely. Keats died at the age of 26 in Rome; he was suffering from tuberculosis. This elegy is one written to honor the memory of a genius.

The poem begins in a tone of dejection and ends in a note of optimism. The injunctive mode of the opening lines captures the note of urgency animating the poem. Shelley is convinced that Keats’ name and work will reverberate throughout time.

In this poem Adonis is a substitute for Keats; Adonis was a handsome and young god who died by being torn apart by boars. In Shelley’s poem the boars are the literary critics of the time whom he thought were being unfairly cruel to Kats by their injudicious vituperations.

In writing this poem, Shelley adopted the pastoral mode in which a shepherd mourns the death of another shepherd. As we saw earlier, Milton’s Lycidas is the finest example of this form, and Shelley was influenced by Milton’s work.

The poem begins by blaming everyone for Keats’ death – the world, God, religion, and most of all himself not protecting him allowing him to die at such a young age.

As the poem progresses a note of assurance, even that of celebration, enters the poem. Towards the end tropes of light are frequently deployed by the poet, and we are convinced that he will live in time like a bright star.

The structure of the poem has been an object of criticism. Some commentators have argued that Shelley initially works within the pastoral elegy mode only to give it up towards the end thereby creating a structural inconsistency.

Because of this, .Auden says that, ‘Indeed, the only elegy I know of which seems to me a failure is Adonais.’ Shelley, however, saw his poem as’ a highly wrougt piece of art.’

Adonais is a poem that is deeply rooted in the Western literary imagination. Its lines draw power and sustenance from Western myths, allegories and allusions. Shelley was a firm believer in the power of poetic words; for him, poetry had displaced religion and poetry had moved to the center of all knowledge.

Therefore poets acted like Gods. This idea runs through Adonais and gives its distinctive aesthetic flavor. This s indeed connected to the idea of time that I discussed earlier. In the case of Gray time is perceived as a possible healer, equalizer, of social disparities while in the case of Shelley the power of time has to be overcome through human effort, in this case, making of poetry.

I have chosen to discuss these four well-known elegies because it seems to me they provide us with a useful background against which to evaluate Asian elegies especially Sri Lankan ones.

The four elegies share many features in common. All four were inspired by the death of a close friend of the poet, although in the case of Gray’s elegy this is less prominent. All four elegies, in addition, are deeply rooted in the Western tradition of elegy-making. Lycidas had an influence on the other three. These four elegies also share an underlying armature of myth.

In all of these elegies private emotion is turned into public event. At the same time, one should recognize that there are important differences as well. For example, in the case of Milton, he sees the power of the poet derived from God whereas Shelly sees the poet as the maker of the world.

As we examine Asian elegies, what we need to keep in mind is the fact that these elegies as poetic products are deeply rooted in their own respective cultures in the way that the four English elegies that I discussed are embedded in the Western literary discourse.

There are also interesting technical similarities and differences. While Shelley and Tennyson experimented with the status of their poetic narrators, Munidasa Cumaratunga, in Piya Samara, also did so by alternately shifting the identity of his poetic narrator between first person and third person viewpoints. These and other issues will be discussed in the subsequent columns.

(to be continued)