How Can A Bereaved Poet?

The deceased are often remembered in either the best of themselves or the worst. Family and friends usually look back and reminisce on the most striking qualities held by their lost loved ones. Death is a shocking and confusing period for those affected by it and the whirlwind of emotions, such as the various stages of grief, catch many by surprise. Born in 1908, Theodore Roethke was an American poet who was deemed one of the most proficient and leading poets of his generation. In his poem, “Elegy for Jane”, Roethke uses a variety of poetic devices to express the different themes of love, happiness, and grief. His use of imagery, symbolism, persona, tone and word choice, contribute to the deeper meaning of the poem, assisting in the expression of the speaker’s feelings for Jane and of how, Jane, herself felt.

“And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious — “When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover” (Poe 679-680).

Throughout the seventeenth century, poets mourned the loss of a child publicly by writing elegies, or poems to lament the deceased. Katherine Philips and Ben Jonson were two poets who implemented the elegiac form in “Orinda Upon Little Hector Philips”, “On My First Son”, and “On My First Daughter” respectively. Although Philips and Jonson’s elegies contain obvious similarities regarding the nature of the works, the differences between the approaches taken to mourn their children are quite contrasting. These differences may be reduced to the emotions displayed in the elegies, which may be considered reflective of the sex of either of the poets and their religious beliefs. The autobiographical grief shown by a mother (Katherine Philips) and

The overt and easy emotional character of men and women is possibly one of the reasons many find this poem so enduringly human. Whatever our weaknesses and failings as humans men and women both are deeply moved by thoughts of home; memories of old love; lost friends; lost youth; and death. Men weep -- Odysseus prodigiously throughout the poem -- the poem is drenched in tears (squeeze text)-- and laughter too. The emotional overtones here are easy and free -- it's an attractive and I think healthy world in that regard.  there are contemporary understandings of human nature that view the capacity for easy emotional discharge as a key to thinking well, thinking rationally. Our intellectual capacities can be stopped up, occluded by, unfinished emotional work. A good cry, a good laugh, a good scream, is just what the doctor ordered. Retentive individuals, cultures, genders, tend to act differently -- irrationally in some areas.

Since the early sixteenth century, elegies and grief themed poems have developed substantially. William Lisle Bowles’ “Time and Grief” and James Montgomery’s “A Poor Wayfaring Man Of Grief” from the Augustan Era, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Love and Grief” and George Meredith’s “The Lesson Of Grief” from the Victorian Era and Charles Bukowski’s “Consummation of Grief” and Thomas Hardy’s “How Great My Grief” from the Modern Era have changed the idea of grief from something that was feared into something that is better understood. As the length of the poems began to decrease, the tone of the poems became less depressing and more insightful, and historical eras and expectations, changed the ideas of grief in the real world was understood better which made it something that

There are some things that we do know about this poem. It is most often referred to as an elegy because of the mood of mourning and regret. Upon further reading I discovered that this poem is like others of its time period. Many

Tracy K. Smith, a Pulitzer Prize­winning poet, has written several collections of poetry during her career. The death of her father influenced her book, Life on Mars. Her father was an engineer that worked on the Hubble Telescope. She used her grief and converted it into pure poetic excellence. Many of her poems can be read as elegiac poems, or poems written in response to death. A traditional elegy reflects the stages of loss. It starts with a lament, where the author expresses grief or sorrow, then he or she praises and admires the idealized dead, and finally consolation and solace. Although personal grief is a common theme that can be taken from the poems in her book, there is a broader feeling of loss throughout.

Auden is sadness, melancholy, and loss. In W.H Auden’s poem, the speaker states, “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from braking with a juicy bone, silence the pianos and with muffled drum bring out the coffin, let the mourners come” (lines 1-4). The first stanza describes the things you would do prior to a funeral and how the living significant other doesn’t want to be disturbed while she is grieving. There is a negative tone that is used throughout this poem that suggest sadness. For example, in line 12 the speaker states, “I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong” (Auden). These lines bring the tone of sadness and melancholy. In lines 11-13, the speaker informs the reader of how her lover was everything to her by stating, “He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song” (Auden). In these lines, we realize how much this man meant to her and now he is gone. These lines also create a shift in tone where we feel the speaker’s solitude and lost that she is experiencing. The speaker uses metaphors in lines 9-11 to give us imagery on how much her lover meant to her. The love of her life was literally

When it comes to the topic of death everyone copes in their own way. Grieving has many stages, it can go by quickly or drag on for months. The quote I have chosen deals with grief and how individuals should not linger on sadness. Some individuals do not deal with death easily and can have an extremely difficult time coping with the loss of a friend or family member. The view point of the poem seems to be from an individual who has passed. The individual would have rather there be no sadness because of their death. The dead should be remembered and have their happy, uplifting memories live on. One should not wallow in sadness for the loss, but celebrate the life that was once there. No one truly dies, memories will be carried on through everyone

The two poems “The Man he Killed” by Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” both have similar qualities but each have different meanings.

Not everything about a person is true when they die. A person can be an abusive alcoholic who neglects their children, a thief that steals from their family, even in a historical event caused the death of many people. Over time it is human nature to want think good of the bad that would be the overall theme of the poem.

Poetic form used correctly can be an effective tool for giving the reader the desired feel or impression of a piece. Poet’s e. e. cummings, John Dryden, Dudley Randall and Dylan Tomas all effectively discuss the topic of death. Even though these poets use different forms and treatments to discuss this topic, some congruity between their pieces exists. The different forms used by these authors are open, neoclassic couplet, ballad, and villanelle. e. e. cummings uses the open form in “Buffalo Bill’s Defunct.”

The shock and catastrophe of the First World War was profound. The elegy was after its original purpose a poem of love and only later modified for poetry of mourning, wherefore it was a poetic form that helped to handle the loss of a person. Before WWI only the individual person was bemoaned and later, after or during WWI, poets started writing elegies to mourn the death of the war’s fallen in general.

The poem starts right away with the personification of death, giving a once bodiless idea a human form. In the very first line of the sonnet the speaker says “Death be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so”(1-2) in this instance, the speaker is being respectful all while showing that death is not “Mighty and dreadful”(2). In this section of the poem the speaker is right up close to death, face to face, a fear among most humans, and is telling one on one that he is not scared anymore. He is declaring that death should be more humble as death is not as important as he believes. The use of the

“Lycidas” is a pastoral elegy in which the speaker, a shepherd, mourns the death of his friend Lycidas, a fellow shepherd and talented poet, who had drowned at sea. However, as the poem progresses, the figure of Lycidas fades into the background as the writing of the poem becomes overwhelmed by the various crises that the speaker experiences and other poetic voices - those of Phoebus and St. Peter, for instance - interrupt. The ninth verse paragraph of “Lycidas” marks the poem’s return to its elegiac intent as the speaker experiences another crisis in which he laments Lycidas’ absent body, a recurring element which, when addressed by the speaker directly, allows the speaker to properly mourn and accept Lycidas’ death.