… Merwin’s poem, so brief, put me on my ear for while, but when I stood again I understood that the elegy is an extremely flexible form—whether extremely long and seemingly disconsolate, like Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” or like Geoffrey Hill’s “September Song” elliptical and encrypted in another form (the sonnet).
There is a medieval Japanese poem — I can't remember the name of the poet, but it is an elegy for her little son:
Where is he now
The brave hunter of dragonflies?
No comments:
Post a Comment