Post on 22-Mar-2016
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Elegy
• a form of lamentation, usually focused on the death of one person
• a conventional elegiac pattern is to follow a cycle of sections, meant to emulate the phases of mourning, from shock to despair to resignation to reconciliation.
• SHOCK – The Going, Your Last Drive, The Walk
• DESPAIR – The Voice• RESIGNATION – Rain on a Grave, The
Visitor • RECONCILIATION – I Found Her Out
There, Lament
Hardy’s elegiac cycle follows the pattern, but with significant variations…
• His outcome is to create an ideal image of Emma – young, vital, warm – setting the poems in Cornwall, where they met…’Beeny Cliff’, ‘At Castle Boterel’, ‘After a Journey’.
• Does ‘love conquer time’ in these poems, as some critics assert?
• Is Hardy’s response more ambivalent? What IS his response in these poems?
• Are the Poems of 1912-1913 love poems?