A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960 - 2015. Группа авторов
lamp resurrect / her glistening lives” (ll. 5–6). The poem reflects on immortality as “light” (l. 8), as many earlier elegies have done, but here the word has suggestions of insubstantiality as well. Where the poem can more readily discern an idea of immortality is in the act of writing, with poetry as a kind of legacy, “transcribing itself for ever” (Motion 1978, 58, l. 15). The transcription of loss has, in fact, been an enduring quality of Motion's work since The Pleasure Steamers (1978), with his poetry showing an acute sensitivity in the way that it inhabits the lives and afterlives of others, whether it be Anne Frank (in “Anne Frank Huis”) or Harry Patch, one of the last survivors of the First World War (in “The Death of Harry Patch”). Among his finest elegies, “Fresh Water” draws powerfully on the river symbolism of traditional elegiac verse to mourn the death of a friend, Ruth Haddon, in the Marchioness riverboat disaster on the Thames in 1989. The death of the poet's father in 2006 prompted new ways of exploring absence and preserving the illusion of presence. “All Possibilities” subtly fuses memory and miracle: “My dead father, who never knew what hit him / is taking his evening walk through the village” (Motion 2009, 56, ll. 1–2). “The Mower” gives a new twist to the archetypal image of death by recalling childhood memories of grass cutting. The speaker imagines his father coming back after death, “but cutting clean through me then vanishing for good” (Motion 2009, 58, l. 52). Motion extends the pastoral resources of the elegy without any straining for effect. “The Gardener,” an elegy for Lieutenant Mark Evison who was killed in Afghanistan in 2009, commemorates a soldier who liked “lending a hand” (l. 5) in the garden and watching the popular TV show, Gardeners' World (Motion 2015, 112). The typography of the poem, with its irregular lineation, catches the speech of the soldier's mother, while his death is foreshadowed in the compost heaps and the cherry tree of the garden.
Seasonal and pastoral motifs have a powerful presence in the poetry of Anne Stevenson, whose sequence of “Sonnets for Five Seasons” mourns the death of her father, Charles Leslie Stevenson, in 1979. The tightly compressed form of the sonnet is used inventively to explore a protracted winter and an anxious spring. A numbing grief gives way to modest hope in nature's restorative patterns, but the elegy cannot altogether abandon its vestigial theological vocabulary: “Birches knelt under ice. Roads forgot / their way in aisles of frost. There were no petals” (“The Circle.” Stevenson 2005, 373, ll. 10–11). In the later “Elegy” for her father, a shared love of music ensures his continuing presence: “his audible image returns to my humming ears” (179, l. 54). The death of Frances Horovitz, whose own Elegy for her father was published as a pamphlet in 1976, sent Stevenson back to the pastoral mode and the lyrical ballad in “Willow Song.” Horovitz (also the subject of Gillian Clarke's elegy “The Hare”) is the inspiration behind “The Fiction‐Makers,” and she is one of a number of poets celebrated and mourned in A Lament for the Makers (2006), Stevenson's Dantesque dream vision, written after the death of Peter Redgrove and dedicated to Philip Hobsbaum.
Ted Hughes is the subject of Stevenson's “Invocation and Interruption,” and her skills in poetic dialogue are evident again in her dream encounter with “the man in black feathers” in A Lament for the Makers (Stevenson 2006). Hughes had himself set new standards for the elegy, with early poems such as “Griefs for Dead Soldiers” and “Six Young Men” mourning England's war dead, and later poems such as “Remains of Elmet” and “Mill Ruins” mourning the casualties of history and the passing of a whole way of life in rural West Yorkshire. Moortown (1979), originally titled Moortown Elegies, was dedicated to the memory of Jack Orchard (Hughes's father‐in‐law) and includes “The Day He Died,” one of the most compelling reworkings of pastoral convention in postwar poetry. Hughes draws on the familiar idea that nature itself mourns the loss of a loved one (“The bright fields look dazed,” l. 14), but he also offers a new take on the idea of managing the land: “From now on the land / Will have to manage without him” (Hughes 2003, 533, ll. 21–22). Birthday Letters, published just a few months before Hughes's death in October 1998, is a powerful elegiac collection of poems, primarily addressed to Sylvia Plath. “Daffodils,” a reworking of an earlier poem of that title, suggests the extent to which the book is also a revision of himself and his relationship with Plath. The poem opens in a casually colloquial style—“Remember how we picked the daffodils?” (l. 1)—but it acquires a metaphysical charge reminiscent of seventeenth‐century poetry, closing with the painful conceit of the scissors, a wedding present used to cut the flowers, somewhere in the earth, “Sinking deeper / Through the sod – an anchor, a cross of rust” (Hughes 2003, 1125–1126, ll. 64–65).
A close attachment to the land ensures that Seamus Heaney, like Hughes, is always at ease with the conventions of pastoral elegy. Death of a Naturalist (1966) mourns his own loss of childhood innocence while acknowledging (in “Requiem for the Croppies”) a long history of sacrifice in the struggle for Irish freedom. Versions of the pastoral are given a powerful elegiac function in Field Work (1979), especially in “The Strand at Lough Beg” (in memory of his second cousin Colum McCartney, the victim of a random sectarian assassination), and “Casualty” (for a fisherman, Louis McNeill, “blown to bits” in a pub bombing [Heaney 1998, 155], I. 38). Remarkably, Heaney has McCartney's shade reprimand him in the title poem of the penitential Station Island for having “saccharined” his death with “morning dew” (Heaney 1998, 261, Section 8, l. 76). Heaney's family elegies, including the early “Mid‐Term Break” (for his infant brother), “Clearances” (a sonnet sequence for his mother), and “Uncoupled” (for his cattle‐farmer father), are among some of the most poignant and deeply moving poems of loss in the English language. A strong sense of his own approaching death gives the family poems in Human Chain, his final collection, an extraordinary tenderness and intimacy.
Michael Longley has likewise established his reputation as a writer who shaped the Troubles elegy with moving and memorable poems of loss, including “Wounds,” “Wreaths,” and “The Ice‐Cream Man,” while also revealing his powers as a love poet and a nature poet. Longley's elegies for the victims of sectarian violence are models of ethical and esthetic restraint, chastened by his acknowledgment in “Kindertotenlieder” that “[t]here can be no songs for dead children” (Longley 2006, 61, l. 1). His scrupulous art conditions his later poems of loss for friends and fellow poets in Snow Water (2004) and A Hundred Doors (2011), and also tempers his candid self‐elegies in these books, as he ponders his own mortality amid the changing landscapes of his beloved Co. Mayo. Longley's close contemporary Derek Mahon sedulously avoided any explicit elegiac response to the Troubles, though his best‐known poem, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” can justly claim its place as a poem of mourning that eloquently speaks for the victims of war and political oppression. Its epigraph is taken from Giorgos Seferis: “Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels” (Mahon 1979, 79). Mahon's suave, ironic style recalls that of Louis MacNeice, to whom he pays tribute in a finely measured elegy, “In Carrowdore Churchyard.”
Paul Muldoon has written some of the most bewildering, experimental elegies of the past few decades: “Incantata” (for the artist Mary Farl Powers), “Yarrow” (for his mother, Bridget Regan), “Turkey Buzzards” (for his sister Maureen), and “Sillyhow Stride” (for Warren Zevon). Muldoon's style is densely allusive, cryptic, and digressive. It flouts traditional elegiac codes and conventions, but it is also strangely consoling, with its occasional intimacies being all the more effective for being unexpected, and its formal intricacies of rhyme and rhythm offering steadiness in the face of futility. “Cuthbert and the Otters” was commissioned for Durham Book Festival in the summer of 2013 and modulated into an elegy for Seamus Heaney later that year. The otter, an emblem for both saint and poet, appears magically in the funeral procession at Bellaghy (recalling the carrying of Cuthbert by his fellow monks), but much is concentrated in a single line paying homage to the translator of Beowulf: “I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead” (Muldoon 2015, 4, l. 21). In sharp contrast to Muldoon's prolonged meditation, Ciaran Carson's “In Memory” takes just a single well‐shaped sentence to record the life of the naturalist who peered into wells and to note how, after his death, “that unfathomable / darkness / echoes / still” (Carson 2014, 21, ll. 16–19).
To mourn the loss of a great