Post 3 / An Elegy / Hannah Pulley

In the Museum of Lost Objects

BY REBECCA LINDENBERG

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee;  

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.       

          Ezra Pound

You’ll find labels describing what is gone:

an empress’s bones, a stolen painting

of a man in a feathered helmet

holding a flag-draped spear.

A vellum gospel, hidden somewhere long ago

forgotten, would have sat on that pedestal;

this glass cabinet could have kept the first

salts carried back from the Levant.

To help us comprehend the magnitude

of absence, huge rooms

lie empty of their wonders—the Colossus,

Babylon’s Hanging Gardens and

in this gallery, empty shelves enough to hold

all the scrolls of Alexandria.

My love, I’ve petitioned the curator

who has acquired an empty chest

representing all the poems you will

now never write. It will be kept with others

in the poet’s gallery. Next door,

a vacant room echoes with the spill

of jewels buried by a pirate who died

before disclosing their whereabouts.

I hope you don’t mind, but I have kept

a few of your pieces

for my private collection. I think

you know the ones I mean.

Rebecca Lindenberg’s elegy, by far, fits more closely with the modern trends described in the poets.org article: “Many modern elegies have been written not out of a sense of personal grief, but rather a broad feeling of loss and metaphysical sadness.” The Museum described is actually empty, but was at one time filled with valuable and rare treasures. At first reading it appears that the elegy focuses mainly on grief and loss: for example, comparing the feeling of absence with a well-recognized symbol of lost potential—the “empty shelves” of the library of Alexandria. At the same time, this could have been an idealized view of the person who is the subject of the poem. A person could mean the world to one person, and be disregarded by all others. There could have been good days and bad days in the relationship of the speaker and the subject, but the memories which remain are treasured. Some solace does come from the memories that the speaker keeps for themself, which are the pieces kept for a “private collection.” In life, there is a way that people mourn loss publicly, differently from how loss is mourned in private, which Lindenberg comments on. We might not all have a physical manifestation of emptiness, but each person has a version of someone no longer here that remains in their mind.  

(I chose this poem mainly because the author's name struck me as familiar— I came across her first published collection of poetry at a bookstore over the summer and read most of it that afternoon. It's called Love, An Index and it's right here.)

Cited:

Lindenburg, Rebecca. "In the Museum of Lost Objects." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 20 Mar. 2012. Web. 24 Sept. 2014. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/243894>.