For the unquiet heart

“Only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind”, W. B. Yeats wrote in 1927; “sex and the dead.” Even if he’d said “to a serious poet’s mind”, this would have been one of his dafter pronouncements. All the same, applied to poetry it makes a kind of sense. In any case, they were on Yeats’s mind. He had recently turned sixty, and it wouldn’t be long before he was looking into unorthodox cures for sexual “fatigue”. He had also suffered a serious illness, as had his lifelong associate and patron, Augusta Gregory; other friends had died. But he was writing some of his finest poems, a number of which are included in The Penguin Book of Elegy.

Rightly so: they are among the best of their kind, that kind being, uncontroversially, elegy – from ancient Greek elegos, a song of mourning or lament. Confusingly, elegos could also indicate a particular metrical arrangement of two lines: the elegiac couplet or distich (“elegiacs”, to those in the know), though poems composed in this metre didn’t necessarily lament anything. (The later, Roman version was usually deployed to satirical or erotic ends.) In English the term “elegy” was sometimes used of almost any longish poem, from the Anglo-Saxon “Seafarer” on, that reflected gravely on serious matters of life and death, in personal or general terms: the best-known example being Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (present here, naturally).

This sense, though, was rare even by Gray’s (mid-eighteenth-century) time; while only a very few, very clever and not always very approachable people now read ancient Greek. So, “a song of mourning or lament” is what, for most of us after two and a half millennia, elegy consists of. This volume gives us two and a half millennia’s worth of such “songs”, by almost 200 poets: “the best and most varied examples we can find of poems of loss and mourning written in English (and translated into English) between Classical antiquity and the present day”, the editors, Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan, tell us. (This really means in English, with a few classical precursors; and a few modern poems in translation that are so familiar to anglophone readers as to have been almost naturalized.)

They have interpreted their brief – or definitions – broadly. So they include, for example, “Sir Patrick Spens”, a well-known border ballad about power and injustice. It contains some deaths, certainly; but, as Muriel Spark once succinctly put it to me, “In the ballads, death is death. No weeping over the grave” – while weeping over the grave is rather the point of elegy. (Another of the ballads, “The Wife of Usher’s Well”, is here too, a haunting supernatural allegory, but hardly elegiac.) The extract from John Skelton’s “Phillip Sparrow” and the poems by Swift and Pope are more satire than elegy per se; while the long extract from Dryden’s Lucretius, calmly and devastatingly making the case against life, and for leaving it, is an anti-elegy if ever there was one.

There is “Matilda”, a charmless chunk of moralizing “light” verse by Hilaire Belloc; one of Propertius’ Elegies, the original of which was in elegiac couplets, sure, but in “our” sense isn’t an elegy (the girl doesn’t die!); “The Farmer’s Bride” by Charlotte Mew (ditto); and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Mother and Poet”, a dramatic lyric in which a mother’s two sons have both made the ultimate sacrifice – or she has – for the Risorgimento, so the elegiac complicates and is complicated by a patriotic groundswell, and by Browning’s sympathies as, indeed, mother and poet. There are some haunted Emily Dickinsons, and the first part of Briggflatts (1966), Basil Bunting’s great “hymn to death”. I’m not saying the book would be better for not including any of these (except perhaps the Belloc), but they make the book’s subtitle, and the editors’ understanding of “poems of loss and mourning”, look elastic.

That being so, why isn’t “The Seafarer” here? And, apropos, I learn from a new, as yet unpublished poem by Karen Solie that “The Old English c[e]arian – ‘to grieve’, ‘to be anxious’, ‘to feel concern’ – / originates in the Proto-Germanic karō, or ‘lament’, / further rooted in the syllable for ‘call out’ or ‘scream’”. The Shorter OED’s first entry for “care (v.)”, meanwhile, is “to sorrow”. Calling out, screaming and sorrowing all have their natural parts to play in human grief. They are all ways of expressing the pain a death or loss has occasioned. A song or lament that was not much more than a cry of pain would not be much of a song; on the other hand, one that has left the human cry too far behind, or no longer bears any trace of sorrow, can hardly be called a lament – an elegy – at all.

More contentiously, Motion and Regan have eschewed chronology in favour of the alphabet. This creates some rewarding and surprising juxtapositions. But it also deprives their anthology of a much more valuable function, potentially, than surprise, one most anthologies recognize and embrace: that of historical guide. The poets’ dates are given, but reading the poems from A to Y or Y to A (I’ve done both) doesn’t give much sense of how the genre developed, from Theocritus (c.310–250 BCE) to Thackeray (William Makepeace, 1811–63), from Bion (c.120–57 BCE) to Batchelor (Paul, 1977–). Thankfully the introduction steps in here, providing a richly informative overview of the genre, from its pastoral origins (all those muses, nymphs and sweetly singing shepherds!) to the grand and/or barmy reimaginings of them by Spenser, Milton and Shelley (and Rilke, though his wonderful “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” is not here, while his ninth “Duino Elegy” is), to the almost-anything-goes twenty-first century.

Most who pick up this book, though, if they are not engaged in study of the genre, will read the poems haphazardly, dipping in and out. They might fall upon any one of several subgenres. Poems predicting, though not always lamenting, the poet’s own death, for example: Swift again, old familiars such as Keats (“When I have fears that I may cease to be …”), Christina Rossetti and Rupert Brooke (inevitably), but also Thomas Campion, Walter de la Mare (subtly elegizing all the living), an impassioned Gwendolyn Bennett and above all the wonderful version by Henry Vaughan of a poem from Tristia in which Ovid, exiled and ill, exhorts his wife not to mourn his second death – the first having been exile itself. (But why no César Vallejo with “I will die in Paris …”?) Or poets elegizing other poets, a substantial proportion of the book. (But no nineteenth-century French ones, no eg Mallarmé with his “tombeaux” for Poe, Baudelaire … ?) Or elegizing a generation (the dead of the First World War), or a people: the Jewish people in Paul Celan’s chilling “Deathfugue”, a poem that is also very much a song; the Dakota, in one by Layli Long Soldier that pointedly does not try to be. Or non-human lives: William Cowper’s hare, Anna Seward’s Old Cat, the poplars beloved of G. M. Hopkins and Cowper (again), Ted Hughes’s sheep.

Then there are the elegies, of whatever period, that concern the poet’s intimates: husband, wife, lover, love object (Hopkins’s “Felix Randal”) or beloved friend (Tennyson’s A. H. H., Elizabeth Bishop’s Robert Lowell), mother or father, child. These are the poems that, unfailingly possessing the quality Philip Larkin called “the authority of sadness”, as you’d expect any elegy to, also speak most directly, affectingly and memorably to us – whenever they were written.

Here, this line begins in the fourteenth century with the Middle English Pearl, a dream-vision in which the anonymous poet, mourning (apparently) his infant daughter, also pursues a theological argument that might reconcile his loss with his faith, brutal fate with Christian sacrifice. I say “apparently” because, conceivably, this remarkable poem memorializes someone else’s daughter – conceivably, a patron’s. It doesn’t feel like that, though. (Not that you’d know it from Motion and Regan’s three-stanza excerpt, which is hardly enough to give a flavour – but, what’s worse, the three stanzas are from a thoroughly flavourless Victorian version, when there are beguiling recent renderings by Jane Draycott and Simon Armitage.) It continues through Bishop (Henry) King’s heartbreaking “Exequy” to his dead wife, Ben Jonson’s brief “Epitaphs” on his daughter and son – “his best piece of poetry” (which Jonson, an artist to his roots, and a fastidious one, surely didn’t believe, except for the duration of these few couplets, which makes them all the more desolate), and Katherines Dyer (c.1585–1654), mourning her husband, and Philips (1632–64), mourning her son.

Dyer is exemplary: direct, familiar, quietly musical, deeply touching.

My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day
Afford thy drowzy patience leave to stay
One hower longer: so that we might either
Sate up, or gonne to bedd together?

(The editors retain non-standard spelling here, as they do for the poems by Skelton and Spenser, while standardizing everyone else, Renaissance, post-Renaissance, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton etc.) “Sate up, or gonne to bedd together …” This domestic note goes to bed or goes underground some time in the later seventeenth century, whereupon the elegy – or mock elegy, as with Swift and Pope – to great or important or at least well-born men and women takes over for 100-odd years. It resurfaces in Wordsworth and William Barnes, thence to be picked up at moments throughout the book’s twentieth century: in Barnes’s admirer Thomas Hardy, in poems by Charles Causley (whose “Eden Rock” continues to deliver its gentle shock, however many times you read it), Tony Harrison, Thom Gunn, Douglas Dunn, Sharon Olds and Paula Meehan, in Peter Porter’s sombre updating of Bishop King and Paul Muldoon’s sorrowful, life-affirming “Incantata”, in the extract from Hannah Sullivan and in Denise Riley’s “A Part Song”, which mourns her son and is by some distance the most eloquent and involving elegy of recent years.

Riley brings a crisp matter-of-factness to bear on her grief and on the art to which she so warily resorts (“You principle of song, what are you for now … ?”). This shouldn’t be confused with hand-wringing about the potential for “self-aggrandizement” implicit, as the editors point out, in the genre, even when the emphasis – as tends to be the case in poems from this century and the last – is on memory and mourning rather than consolation, Christian or other. It is an awkward truth that the poetic expression of private grief for someone close, if it is consoling at all, is probably more so to the poet who expresses it than to anyone else (“… for the unquiet heart and brain / A use in measured language lies; / The sad mechanic exercise, / Like dull narcotics, numbing pain”, in Tennyson’s measured lines). It might even be rewarding in other ways as well.

Geoffrey Hill acknowledges as much in parenthesis in his celebrated “September Song”, ostensibly an elegy on a child victim of the Holocaust with whom Hill happened to all but share a birthday: “(I have made / an elegy for myself it / is true)”. To my ear, this is too pleased with its own ambiguity by half, too – given the subject – comfortably self-exonerating. Countee Cullen more simply and persuasively closes her “Threnody for a Brown Girl”,

We who take the beaten track,
Trying to appease
Hearts near breaking with their lack,
We need elegies.

In any case, what is more affecting, memorable etc about Riley’s poem and those I’ve enlisted along with it is the “terrible gift of intimacy” – in subject matter, feeling, tone of address. (This isn’t something separate, or separable, from “the poetry”.) Riley the modernist makes us uneasily aware of the double-edged nature of that gift. But isn’t that all the more reason why these poems are so compelling? While Letitia Landon’s lengthy elegies to Felicia Hemans, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s on the same “Poetess”, or for that matter the same E. B. Browning’s stanzas mourning Landon, are all written according to a set of conventions in language and feeling that now seem so dead to us as to be beyond recovery.

Am I missing something that might be picked up by a female ear? And couldn’t a similar charge be brought against, say, Dryden’s “Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings”? Its muscular, classically inflected wit won’t appeal to everyone, for sure. T. S. Eliot (in 1927, again: what a year for laying down the law) may have declared Dryden to be “one of the tests of a catholic appreciation of poetry”, but that seems almost meaningless today, when any appreciation of poetry – especially poetry that makes any kind of demand, imaginative, formal, intellectual or other, of a reader – is no longer a given, even among students of English literature. But this book, edited by two university professors of literature, one a recent British poet laureate (Dryden was the first), takes for granted that readers still exist, and not just in universities, for poetry from times and places, and in idioms, very unlike our own, that makes demands of us. And, it follows that such a reader might still appreciate the virtuosity and energy of Dryden’s rhyming couplets (standard iambic pentameter, not an elegiac distich in sight), even if the intricacies of his political and social worlds fail to grip.

Similarly, his successor Pope. No one is obliged to admire virtuosity, of course. But compared to Dryden and Pope, a Landon poem looks distinctly tired. Don’t the editors implicitly admit as much with their note pointing out that in her time she was a “popular and influential” writer? This is historically important work, then. Which is fine – but it’s not necessarily “the best and most varied”. Or take another popular and influential writer: Elizabeth Rowe, whose Friendship in Death (1728) outsold Robinson Crusoe and Clarissa. Alas, “Upon the Death of her Husband” (composed 1715–17) proclaims, more than anything else, her wifely devotion to preserving a treasured ideal, proclaims it in mechanical-sounding couplets and routine terms of reverence – “just” ambition, “spotless” faith, “sacred” passion and so on – and comes across as more of a historical curio than a living poem. The reader in 2024 might even suspect a whitewash. (To be fair, Rowe’s ninety-seven lines do include one arresting one: “Why did they tear me from thy breathless clay?”)

Conversely, Milton: by common consent, one of the most historically important poets of all. In “Lycidas” he wrests something magnificent, rich and strange from a weird mix of Christian piety, classical machinery and personal animus, as well as grief. Utterly alien as some of those components might be to contemporary sensibilities, “Lycidas” obviously has to be here, on historical and poetic grounds alike; while the hyperbole, the extravagance, of elegies by Donne or Richard Crashaw is something altogether more baroque, Catholic, risky and overwrought – altogether more now.

Some notable absences from the book (no “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”, nothing from Birthday Letters, 1998, which might not contain much good poetry, but was a landmark in the genre, nothing at all from Eugenio Montale, whose poems for the women he had loved and lost – to death, or to time and circumstance – are some of the essential poems of the twentieth century) may be due to economics. The goddess Inclusivity, hand in hand with academic and publishing politics, meanwhile, has almost certainly mandated one or two presences. Given their combined knowledge and experience, I am sorry the editors have nothing to say in their otherwise helpful notes about the poems’ formal qualities, and how these relate to each other through time: how Yeats borrowed the eight-line stanza of “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” (and several other of his late poems) from Abraham Cowley’s “On the Death of Mr William Hervey”, for example, and how it was then re-adopted in Muldoon’s “Incantata”. Or how rhymed couplets, of which there are examples from the earliest periods represented here, mutate as they come down through the centuries – through Dryden, Nicholas Rowe and many others – to shape Thom Gunn’s fine “Lament” in 1984.

Notwithstanding, The Penguin Book of Elegy contains, entire, “Lycidas”, Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” (inspired by the death of Lincoln), Amy Clampitt’s magniloquent-but-somehow-moving “Procession at Candlemas”, Celan, Muldoon and Riley; nine sections of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) and several pages of the best of Hardy (whose “Poems of 1912–13”, written in his seventies, sometimes seem the best modern lyric poems, let alone elegies, in English); Yeats’s terrific tributes to the heroes, antiheroes and heroines, great, good and bad, of his tumultuous times, and W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”; Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”, which looks more like the poem of our times with every passing decade; and all those Greek and Roman and English and other precursors, canonical and otherwise, inside one set of covers. These make their own argument, and represent seriously good value.

Also, that this handsome, attractively printed volume comes (with the inevitable handful of typos), so late in the day, from a major commercial publisher seems like a serious vote of confidence – an act of faith, almost. So, kudos, and gratitude. One small, personal beef: the London Review of Books, Poetry Review, the Listener, Quadrant and the Hudson Review are all credited with first publication of some of the poems here; the TLS (“Incantata”, Mick Imlah’s “Stephen Boyd” and others), not once. If publishing history matters, it matters, so why not this paper? If it doesn’t, why the others?

Alan Jenkins is a former Poetry Editor and Deputy Editor of the TLS. His most recent collection of poems, The Ghost Net, was published in 2023

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