An Examination of Natural Elegy in “Elegy on a Young Thrush”
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Traditionally defined as either a mournful song or a poem made of elegiac couplets, the elegy is, at its core, both a manifestation and transformation of a speaker’s grief over the loss of a cherished family member or friend. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge, British Romantic poet and honored critic argues, “Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It may treat of any subject, but… always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself” (1). As Coleridge recognizes, this deeply thoughtful and reminiscent poetic form exists at the center of literary tradition and culture.
Elegy doesn’t exist solely for the reader; it is an active poetical form that permits for the poet’s active reflection and consolation. Moving from a locale of lament and loss to a place of resolution, the ideal elegy inhabits the space between “the extremes of life and death, joy and sorrow… at the very moment in which we confront our mortality” (Weisman 1).
In the years since its origin in Roman love poetry, the elegiac poem has shifted both in content and religious orientation. What was once a love poem turned itself inside-out, and became a poetic form for mourning; likewise, the once bright and assuring Christian elegies were replaced by the emptier, secular elegies of the present (Strand and Boland 168). Given its historical dynamism, the elegy proliferates in both private and public avenues, leaving the rhyme scheme and metrics up to the discretion of the poet.
Some poets push elegiac boundaries further, like Helen Maria Williams, a well-venerated Romantic British poet from same time as William Wordsworth. In her 1823 poem “Elegy on a Young Thrush,” Williams chooses not to mourn “an important public figure or someone with [whom she had] a close personal connection” and does not come to a clear consolation (“Elegy”). She does not mourn the loss of a husband or child, a distinction that (for some critics) would jeopardize the poem’s classification as an elegy. Williams chooses to reflect upon the death of a wounded thrush—a common bird—instead, forming a foreboding reminder to her reader about the frailty of all life. Nevertheless, as it still aligns with the greater structure and enduring themes of elegy present in other prominent poems like Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” and John Milton’s “Lycidas”, Helen Maria Williams’ “Elegy on a Young Thrush” is a functional and effective example of an elegy.
With both a distinct three-part structure and a lyric mode, “Elegy on a Young Thrush” aligns neatly with traditional elegiac structure. Like Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”, Williams follows a three-part structure in which a speaker begins with a startling exposition, then enters an idealized reality outside of the present, and at last copes with their despondent reality. Using eight heroic quatrains written in iambic pentameter, Williams forms a somber tale of the death of a previously rescued thrush after it believes that it is healed enough to leave the speaker’s protection.
First, the speaker identifies the thrush’s shocking fall from grace after parting from the speaker. The thrush’s wounded wing was not yet healed, and the speaker desperately wishes that the bird would have had “foresight in… [its] breast” so that it could have avoided “[t]hat gloomy area lurking cats infest” (Williams 5, 7). Immediately after, the speaker then follows with an idealized portrait of the thrush and her interacting in the future if unhappy fortune had not befallen the former; she offers the oxymoronic reward of “lavish crumbs” to the thrush and uses the anaphora “And” five times throughout the third through eighth stanzas to rhythmically assure the thrush of her dedication to maintaining its health (9, 19). At last, the speaker returns to the gloom of the present and acknowledges the absence of the thrush. Ending with a disquieting reflection on whether the “[i]llfated bird!” is like “Man,” a race that “mistake[s] the path that leads to bliss”, Williams’ speaker claims that humans often are subject to folly and misdirection, even when they strive to choose their path wisely (29, 30, 33).
Just as Williams uses a three-part structure in her elegy, so too does one of the most famous elegies by Walt Whitman: “O Captain! My Captain!”. Throughout the poem’s three stanzas, Whitman reflects on the death of Abraham Lincoln in three different stages, very similar to Williams’ elegiac organization. In the first stanza, the speaker shouts out, alarmed and impassioned at the sight of the fallen captain. A total of six, short exclamations (for example, “O Captain!”) during this stanza alert readers that the captain’s fall is a serious and critical event (Whitman 1). Whitman’s second stanza echoes the denial and idealism present in “Elegy on a Young Thrush,” as the speaker stands in a state of disbelief, murmuring: “It is some dream that…/ You’ve fallen cold and dead” (15–16). The speaker finally acknowledges the passing of the captain in the final stanza; he comes to a greater conclusion like Williams, that even though the “prize [he] sought was won”, the speaker will continue to lament the loss of his fallen leader (2). Now hopeless, Whitman’s speaker does not cry out “O Captain!” hoping for a response. He has learned to accept the personal grief that death brought him through elegy, just as Williams’ speaker discovered that she must do when she loses sight of her dear thrush.
Not only does Williams’ “Elegy on a Young Thrush” adhere to the same poetical structure as Walt Whitman’s most prominent elegy, but it also abides by the limits of traditional elegiac theme and mode. Elegies are characterized by their adherence to two main themes: death and loss (Strand and Boland 168). Just as Walt Whitman mourns a public figure and Milton grieves for a fellow poet, Williams’ succinct elegy is also based on lamentation. However, it does diverge from normal elegy as it does lament the loss of animal life instead of human life. The audience cannot connect in the same way to the lamented. Nonetheless, Williams’ elegy effectively emulates the theme of loss.
At the time that Williams wrote this mournful elegy in England in the early 1800s, women in Great Britain were tightly confined to the domestic sphere. The thrush in Williams’ poem could have represented womens’ potential emancipation from household life had it lived to maturity and been free to come and go as it pleased. However, this bird’s tragic passing might represent the realistic stifling of imagined female freedoms. By juxtaposing the dark, thematic imagery of the dismal present with the buoyant light imagery of the imagined future, Williams holds the speaker and thrush subject to the greater theme of captivity, or loss of freedom. Both the speaker and the thrush both start and end as captives—one framed by injury, the other by injurious social circumstance—with both of their stories closing in death. In this manner, Williams draws distinct connection between the mortality of both human and animal life in this elegy. The majority of Williams’ specific diction relating to the thrush is expressed in a dark, despondent tone; adjectives like “down” and “gloomy” as well as verbs like “stray” and “infest” in the second stanza underscore the speaker’s reflection on their own mortality (7, 8).
Finally, Williams’ “Elegy on a Young Thrush” is a lyric poem, a prominent characteristic of elegy as a poetic form. As Oxford editor Karen Weissman articulates, elegiac modes are “primarily lyric”, meaning that the speaker uses a first person voice that reveals what the author is thinking and feeling in the moment that the poem was written (1). Williams’ implementation of the ubi sunt motif demonstrates the centrality of the lyric mode to this elegy. Ubi sunt motifs, which are delivered in the form of a question, signal the removal of something originally familiar to the speaker; they fashion an uncertain, morose mood that is critical to the success of an elegy’s exposition. “Mistaken Bird, ah whither hast thou stray’d?” cries out the speaker in the first line, expressing the speaker’s genuine lament through solemn inquiry (Williams 1). This emotional outpour does not receive an answer, however.
Just as Helen Maria Williams implements the ubi sunt motif, so does Thomas Milton in “Lycidas,” his masterful 1637 pastoral elegy. Seeking reason for the death of his late classmate and poet Edward King, Milton’s speaker implores “Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep/ Clos’d o’ver the head of your beloved Lycidas?” echoing the same grieved yearning of Williams’ speaker (50–51). Through their use of the first person narrative, both Williams and Milton centralize the perceptions of their readers and allow audience members to assume the position of the first-person speaker. This draws the audience closer to the work, and aligns the speaker and reader in terms of emotional connection to the material.
Elegy, as defined generally, is a poetic form that seeks to satisfy and console both the poet and the audience through an active mourning process. Elegies have undergone labyrinthine genre shifts over time, from a love poem to a poem of deep sorrow and mourning. They force us to confront our mortality, an intimidating summit that few individuals truly want or choose to climb.
At times in our culture, it seems taboo to speak in depth about grieving, death, and personal loss. Elegy as a genre offers us a way to find catharsis, a way to release the mortal pain we shoulder.
Works Cited
Auden, W. H.. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” Oxford Essential Quotations. Ratcliffe, Susan. Oxford University Press, January 01, 2017.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Murray, 1835.
“Elegy.”The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition, edited by Stephen Cushman, et al., Princeton University Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, www.ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/calpoly/detail.action?docID=913846. Accessed 17 May 2019.
Milton, John, et al. “Lycidas.” Poems of Mr. John Milton: The 1645 Edition with Essays in Analysis. Gordian Press, 1968.
Strand, Mark, and Eavan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Weisman, Karen. The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. Oxford University Press, September 18, 2012. Oxford Handbooks Online. www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199228133.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199228133. Accessed 19 May 2019.
Whitman, Walt. “O Captain! My Captain?” Leaves of Grass. Barnes & Noble Inc., 1993.
Williams, Helen Maria. “Elegy on a Young Thrush.” Poems on Various Subjects: With Introductory Remarks on the Present State of Science and Literature in France. G. and W.B. Whittaker, London, 1823.
