Little Elegy
Elinor Wylie
Withouten you
No rose can grow;
No leaf be green
If never seen
Your sweetest face;
No bird have grace
Or power to sing;
Or anything
Be kind, or fair,
And you nowhere.
Wylie, Elinor. "Little Elegy." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 24 Sept. 2014. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175343.
This poem is a traditional elegy in that it is a response to the death of a person that reflects on loss. However, it does not exactly mirror the three stages of grief, as many elegies do. The poem is fairly brief, but it clearly captures the sorrow that accompanies such a great loss. The speaker expresses this sadness by lamenting the death of this person and decribing how the world can not be the same without them. For example, in the closing lines, the speaker claims that nothing can "be kind, or fair, and you nowhere." Instead of focusing on praising the admirable qualities of the dead or finding solace in the occasion, the poem mostly discusses the first stage of grief: lamentation and sadness.
Can it still be considered an actual elegy if it's missing a key element of an elegy? Either way, the sadness and lamentation can be felt through this poem, so that has to count for something. Maybe this writer had yet to reach the other stages of grief, so she could only write about the first stage.
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