Elegy (1958). Content and Description

Roethke wrote this poem later in his career; it appears in The Far Field, a posthumous volume published in 1964 that was awarded the National Book Award for that year. On the whole, The Far Field is more deeply meditative than some of Roethke’s other collections, and the subject matter, along with the poet’s voice, bears this out. This poem, for instance, is indeed an elegy, a type of poem written to commemorate the death of a person, usually but not always, someone the poet knew personally.

Unlike many elegies, however, this one does not idealize the dead person, the speaker’s aunt Tilly, but rather describes her in plain, simple language that is often anything but flattering. The poem opens, for example, by telling us that Aunt Tilly’s face was like “a rain beaten stone on the day she rolled off / With the dark hearse” (ll. 1-2). Note, too, the line break and the way it seems to accentuate the casual nature of the death. If we stop reading at line 1 it seems as if Aunt Tilly simply rolled out of this life nonchalantly.

Despite this unflinching, almost casual language, however, Aunt Tilly is recalled to the speaker’s mind with great affection, such as when he remembers how she “sat with the dead . . . fed and tended the infirm” and “faced up to the worst” (ll. 8-9, 11). For all of the reminiscences about his aunt, however, the speaker does not avoid the difficult facts of her death, telling us that “she died in agony, / Her tongue, at the last, thick, black as an ox’s” (ll. 16-17).

This unflinching portrait of a loved one’s death may be shocking to us, but the speaker clearly wants us to know the truth about both Aunt Tilly’s life and her death. It is in this way that he has chosen to honor her. The affectionate portrait continues in the poem’s conclusion, where the speaker calls his aunt the “terror of cops, bill collectors and betrayers of the poor” (l. 18) and pictures her “in some celestial supermarket, / Moving serenely among the leeks and cabbages” (ll. 19-20). The poem thus presents a complex portrait of a beloved member of the speaker’s family, a portrait that captures the grace and generosity of Aunt Tilly as well as the almost casual facts of her death.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Reflect upon your own experiences with death. Have you lost someone close to you? If so, how did your feelings compare to the speaker’s feelings in “Elegy”? What was different/similar about the way you felt?

2. Why does Roethke end the poem with Aunt Tilly’s staring down the butcher? What is he trying to tell us about her personality? What is Aunt Tilly’s personality? Describe it using evidence from the poem.

3. Why do we tend to idealize someone when he or she dies? What is Roethke trying to tell us with the way he deliberately avoids idealizing Aunt Tilly?

4. Compare Roethke’s poem with Thomas Gunn’s “The Beautician,” from his 1992 book entitled The Man with Night Sweats. The book includes many poems set in the context of AIDS-plagued San Francisco in the 1980s. Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, England, in 1929 and lived most of his adult life in San Francisco, where he died in his home in 2004. With both poets’ lives in mind, how do these two poems comment on the nature of loss? What does each have to say about memory and idealization of those who have died? How do both poems complement and diverge from each other?