Elegy

This week we looked at "The Seafarer." It is a poem that has such a strong and sorrowful tone to it. Whenever I read it, I can almost feel my toes getting cold from the cold wet salty sea. Pick three poems from the list of elegies, print them off and be ready to share with the class what it is saying and what it means to you as a reader. You may also look for elegies that are not on this list. I've posted five questions that you should be able to answer.

1. Who do you think the author is writing to?
2. What is the intended tone of the poem? How does the author get this tone across?
3. Find three words that evoke emotion in the reader and pick out two strong images. Why/how does the author convey the meaning of the poem through the use of these images?
4. What was your first response to the poem? How did it change as you reread the poem?
5. The overarching question: "Why are elegies so important in our society today?


"Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden
"To the Dead" by Frank Bidart
"Fugue of Death" by Paul Celan
"Because I Could Not Stop For Death" by Emily Dickinson
"Dying Away" by William Meredith
"To an Athlete Dying Young" by A. E. Housman
"Death Stands Above Me" by Walter Savage Landor
"The Reaper and the Flowers" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"For the Union Dead" by Robert Lowell
"Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
"Elegy for Jane" by Theodore Roethke
"November" by Edmund Spenser
"Question" by May Swenson
"In Memoriam" by Lord Alfred Tennyson
"A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London" by Dylan Thomas
"O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman

You should be able to find all of these poems by doing a simple google search.

Finally, post the three poems that you chose and a paragraph telling us why you chose them or why you think they are important in what they are saying.