Poetry Analysis Essay on Elegy

Introduction

Elegy is a poem that depicts a severe reflection that usually laments about the dead (Huhndorf 196). A traditional poem traces its roots to the Greek origin covering a range of complex matters such as love, war, and death. In other regions, it is considered the most fantastic and erotic concept of man's existence. Moreover, due to its rhetorical effects in structure, it was used by the Greeks poets to portray wits, humor, and fear in satiric subjects that affected the society. Elegy is also considered as a form of poetry that naturally reflects on the cognitive domain of the poet. It extensively expresses the feeling of regrets for the past and the strong desire for the future. Thus it incorporates the aspects of love and sorrow as the principal themes. It represents the allure of the lost and gone aspects of life. Therefore, this paper is premised on analyzing the extent to which elegy has transcended its immediate occasion exploring other entities such as politics and aesthetics while still maintaining the general expectation.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Numerous elegies have broken the limit of the restricted traditional concepts that focused mainly on grief, regret, and desire (Rodowick n.p). Many have incorporated the chance to rethink the vexed experience of trouble in the modern technological world. It should not be depended upon for great solace as fractured speech. In "Mourning and Melancholia" Freud display how grief can impair an individual's mental status when the individual chooses to suppress such sorrows. He states that melancholia is profoundly painful, self-absorbing and leads to regarding of feelings within an individual that may become destructive if persistence repression is encouraged.

For each of the three poets, they reflect the beautiful and striking experience that life provided and currently it's not available (Tiffany Stanley 6). They view history as playing essential functions as part of the mourning process as they bear witness and testimonies to the terrible tragedies that have befallen the people, a nation, and a world in which human beings kill each other mercilessly. It also reflects on the evil that the political leaders have incorporated into the society by encouraging vices instead of inculcating positive moral virtues as they compete for the various position of power. In uniting to reproof, rebuke and scold such compromising depravities, they use elegies beyond its expected borders. In doing so, they pass the personal grief to collective grief that lessens the destructive pain that may lead to impaired and unstable condition.

Death is the most familiar aspect of the human existence, the respect accrued to the dead has drastically developed over the years (Tiffany Stanley 8). More so, individuals and advocates have used the elegies throughout the history to demand political change in the society. During the pre-civil war, the slaves used the laments to sanction their masters to pay respect to the slaves, and they used it to demand better burial status concerning the life well lived. In the modern technological world, death is associated with loss of talent, experience, and knowledge. Most communities incorporate elegy to sanction government to investigate the reason for penalties in a particular region. Moreover, they are accustomed to advocating for radicle changes in a city and a nation at large. For example, elegies discouraging political assassination in respect to the past murders of political elites compels the government to establish laws hindering such occurrences

However, sometimes common lament reminds an individual of the upset loss. It inflames rather than assuage the guilt by making an individual continue undergoing melancholic mourning (Ramazani 17). The blame that the elegy depicts can make individuals to punish themselves through self-induced pains. To escape the inward hostility that tampers with such individuals, they often tend to seek to avenge the dead. Turning and expressing their rage to the outside environment, they disable their cognitive domain. Moreover, filling the elegy with melancholic danger and ambivalent relaxes its traditional links with the poetry and praise. For example, political rivalry sometimes lead to the murder of people hence lament may motivate the affected relatives to seek revenge against the perpetrator of the killing. The rage and grief may lead to social and political tension within a nation when a powerful family dedicates their muscles to revenging their killed victim.

Nevertheless, Freud argues that modern elegy mourns not only the dead person but also the traditional lament that has lost its aesthetic effects on the society. He further states that death ceremonies have provided a platform for elegist to highlight their prowess in narrating the death history. Rather than curing death through beautiful poems, modern poets critically analyze the ethical ground for the uplifting art developed by the feeding of the magnitude of new ideas. For instance, modern elegy laments on public figures, relatives, war victims and other extraordinary deaths such as the death of God and death of mourning rituals. For example, elegies were actively used to lament the end of war victims in America after the massive death outcomes of the Civil war. The conflict resulted in the highest number of deaths in the American history. Therefore, the role of elegy is to display and remind people of their history to avoid the same events in the future.

Therefore, the elegies often undermine the standard expectation of most communities by knowingly neglecting the consolatory aspect of the requiem (Ramazani 18). Most authors of elegy focus on entertaining the mourners and evoking vengeance feeling against the perpetrators of the specific event while ignoring the fundamental role of the elegy of consoling the victims. For example, Jonson states that he may have killed his son with too much love; Elizabeth Barrett anchors the same by eradicating any political redemption at the close of "Mother and Poet." Additionally, elegist has trimmed their mourning poems to exclude the consolatory aspects to compete favorably in the market. The marketability of an elegy determines its elasticity in the society. Laments of mourning precession, flower catalogs, and conventional reversal have been drastically trimmed to enable the funeral to survive as other mourning aspects diminished.

Although modernism mourning involves concealing the dead with various aesthetic elements such as the makeups, posh coffins, and euphemism, the modern elegies strip the dead of such pleasures and remove their physical and psychological masks (Ramazani 13). Also, despite the mourning and grieving tone expected during funeral events, elegies ironically adopt a self-mocking, anti-therapeutic and anti-sentimental tone turning the funeral grief into a pathology, a kind of a temporal sickness that needs immediate quarantine and cure. Moreover, modern elegist considers death as a helper to deepen, enlarge and strengthen subjectivism in the midst of increasingly dehumanizing and bureaucratic economic life. For example, they conform to the socio-economic sphere while neglecting the humanity and the human nature of love, care, and grief.

When elegists emphasized that no state has found the cure for grief whether, in herbs, law or gospel, they neglect their role of comforting mourners during the devastating times (Ramazani 9). The primary objective of the elegist should be to elevate mourners and encourage them to express their sorrows and grief rather than repressing them. Although the psychoanalytic concept of mourning has enabled individuals to understand the trends of modern elegy, their theories are incoherent and reductive hence therefore to promote better understanding and appreciation of the ideas; there is need to establish a first conscious exploration of mourning.

Conclusion

In summary, deaths and mourning is part of human existence and elegy as a poem depicts peoples sorrow and grief in the society during such devastating moments. Elegy enables an individual to reflect the past chronological events with the victim that may result in more disturbing sorrow or rage. However, the modern laments have neglected their role of consoling affected mourners. It has continued to emphasize on the economic benefits to the poet and the elasticity of the piece. Moreover, modern elegies discourage various aesthetic aspects related to mourning such as the application of makeup and posh coffins, but it strips the dead of all the luxuries leaving it naked and vulnerable.

Works Cited

Huhndorf, Shari. "That the People Might Live." Loss and Renewal in Native American Elegy the Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations Winning the West with Words: Language and Conquest in the Lower Great Lakes." (2015): 194-197.

Ramazani, Jahan. The poetry of Mourning: The modern elegy from Hardy to Heaney. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Rodowick, David Norman. The Elegy for theory. Harvard University Press, 2014.

Tiffany Stanley. The disappearance of a distinctively black way to mourn. The Atlantic.2016.