{"id":42056,"date":"2012-11-19T10:15:56","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T15:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=42056"},"modified":"2013-04-22T16:18:36","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T20:18:36","slug":"%e2%80%9crepeat-repeat-repeat-revise-revise-revise%e2%80%9d-poets-mourning-poets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/19\/%e2%80%9crepeat-repeat-repeat-revise-revise-revise%e2%80%9d-poets-mourning-poets\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201crepeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise\u201d: Poets Mourning Poets"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI used to want to live \/ to avoid your elegy,\u201d Robert Lowell confessed in \u201cFor John Berryman.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nThe death of one poet is an extraordinary occasion for another poet. It is like the day a stonemason dies and another has to carve his headstone. Like a rough ashlar, the elegy sits waiting to be shaped into a memorial for the one who is gone. The death of a poet so great as Jack Gilbert last week pains, but also promises remembrances fitting the one who died.<\/p>\n

Gilbert devoted most of his elegies to his wife, Michiko Nogami, but poets have forever elegized one another. We can trace the canon through the poems that poets have written to mourn their own: Henri Cole grieving Elizabeth Bishop; Bishop remembering Robert Lowell; Lowell lamenting the death of John Berryman; Berryman longing for Roethke, Jarrell, Hughes, Plath, Schwartz, and William Carlos Williams; W.H. Auden elegizing Yeats; Shelley bemoaning the loss of Keats; all the way back to Ovid mourning Orpheus.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Across the eras, through all the years, elegies have retained three features: lament, at having to confront the particular death of the subject, but also the subject of death; repetition, as a formal technique and mechanism for grieving; and the achievement of resurrection or apotheosis.<\/p>\n

\nElegies are not bashful: they foreground death, announce their sorrow, and draw others into their grief. Lament truly animates the form, as Percy Bysshe Shelley\u2019s \u201cAdonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats\u201d illustrates.<\/p>\n

Shelley\u2019s elegy begins: \u201cI weep for Adonais\u2014he is dead!\u201d Immediately after announcing Keats\u2019s death and his own personal grief, Shelley invites readers into his mourning: \u201cO, weep for Adonais! though our tears \/ Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!\u201d The speaker\u2019s solitary sorrow widens to include the audience in the lament\u2014not only readers but poetry itself as Shelley collects the subjects of Keats\u2019s poetry into the poem.<\/p>\n

Lament often inaugurates elegies, but repetition organizes them. Take Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s \u201cNorth Haven,\u201d written for Robert Lowell one year after his fatal heart attack. Although she is looking at one of Lowell\u2019s most beloved seascapes in Maine, she resists the pathetic fallacy. Bishop does not believe that nature is shedding tears simply because she is. \u201cThe islands haven\u2019t shifted since last summer,\u201d she writes, and then acknowledges, \u201ceven if I like to pretend they have.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also recognizes that the constancy of nature is illusory: \u201cthe goldfinches are back, or others like them.\u201d Not even nature resists change, although it does repeat itself year after year, bringing new finches and growing different flowers even though the seasons themselves seem unchanging. \u201cNature repeats herself,\u201d Bishop concedes, \u201cor almost does: \/ repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.\u201d<\/p>\n

The qualification is most chilling: \u201calmost\u201d is the way in which the dead are \u201calmost\u201d but not quite alive. That concession forces Bishop to acknowledge what she has denied until the poem\u2019s final stanza: \u201cYou left North Haven, anchored in its rock, \/ afloat in mystic blue … And now\u2014you\u2019ve left \/ for good.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n It takes repetition\u2014of the seasons and the songbirds, of the leaving and the taking leave\u2014for Bishop to acknowledge and elegize Lowell\u2019s death. Repetition as a formal poetic structure mimics the repeated elements of funerals, wakes, and rituals marking death. \u201cRepeat after me,\u201d the clergy say, and so we do. Whole liturgies dance this dance of calling and responding, so not surprisingly elegiac poems are built through the repetition of words and phrases.<\/p>\n

Together repetition and lament lead to something more than the words on the page. Lowell is alive in the fifth stanza of Bishop\u2019s poem: eternally chatting with us about North Haven, where he \u201cfirst \u2018discovered girls\u2019\u201d and is always having \u201csuch fun.\u201d Lowell speaks through the stanza, living forever between the lines\u2014a miracle that did not trouble Bishop, but which obsessed W.H. Auden.<\/p>\n

The resurrection that is possible in poetry worried Auden, whose elegy of W. B. Yeats is one of the most remarkable ever written. \u201cTime,\u201d Auden noticed, <\/p>\n

\n

is intolerant <\/p>\n

Of the brave and innocent, <\/p>\n

And indifferent in a week, <\/p>\n

To a beautiful physique,<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

but \u201cworships language and forgives \/ Everyone by whom it lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

The poetry that survives the poet is immutable and the poem that elegizes the poet is immortal, but the poet himself is gone forever. That everything but the poet survives unsettles Auden, who seems most mournful that apotheosis requires absence.<\/p>\n

Auden, like Bishop, considers the pathetic fallacy. He opens his elegy by observing that Yeats died in \u201cthe dead of winter,\u201d when \u201call of the instruments agree \/ The day of his death was a dark cold day.\u201d His real focus, however, is what we might call the poetic fallacy: the uncomfortable reality that \u201cThe words of a dead man \/ Are modified in the guts of the living.\u201d<\/p>\n

For thousands, the day that Yeats died was nothing more than \u201ca day when one did something slightly unusual.\u201d Yet those very persons will be the \u201cvessel\u201d of his memory. \u201cHe became his admirers,\u201d Auden says, meaning that Yeats, like all poets, lives only in the poetry he left behind. Nowhere is that reality clearer than in the elegies poets have written for one another.<\/p>\n

Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI used to want to live \/ to avoid your elegy,\u201d Robert Lowell confessed in \u201cFor John Berryman.\u201d The death of one poet is an extraordinary occasion for another poet. It is like the day a stonemason dies and another has to carve his headstone. Like a rough ashlar, the elegy sits waiting to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":383,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[629,9249,8323,6487,165,1681,630,2704,7179,9250,2160,8928,3915],"class_list":["post-42056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-elizabeth-bishop","tag-henri-cole","tag-jack-gilbert","tag-john-berryman","tag-poetry","tag-randall-jarrell","tag-robert-lowell","tag-sylvia-plath","tag-ted-hughes","tag-theodore-roethke","tag-w-h-auden","tag-w-b-yeats","tag-william-carlos-williams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201crepeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise\u201d: Poets Mourning Poets by Casey N. 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