An elegy can express anything from personal loss to grief for the planet. In finding the words, we acknowledge our pain and perhaps find a deep love beneath it.

Moving Beyond Despair

How do we move past despair? LeAnne Howe, a modern Choctaw poet, captures the resilience that underlies our losses in her poem...

The need for mourning

At first I was going to say, "How do we overcome despair?" But we don't overcome it, we move past it. Despair clears the horizon, and then we move forward. To recover from losses—to recover from any kind of loss—we have to mourn. 

In Japan, there is a wonderful tradition called shūkatsu that encourages people to prepare for death. It's done in part by keeping your affairs in order, but also by facing the facts of death squarely. In some cases, people are invited to lie down in a coffin or choose the clothes they want to wear at their funeral. Some people may write a poem expressing their view of the world, to be read at their funeral if they die that year.

In the West, we have the great tradition of writing obituaries and elegies. If you have ever done this you know that it is writing in an altered state, one of acute grief. And this can be a state of deep concentration and focus but also a state of deep love.

Grief allows us to cherish another person without reservation. In grief we often feel love quite profoundly. 

An elegy is a formal expression of this love. It's a form that began with the ancient Greeks and has been practiced in every culture. Elegies often express the struggle of the writer: the struggle to move through the paralysis of grief, to come to a place of consolation and acceptance. Elegies are best written after some time has passed, when this journey is near completion. Robert McDowell, a Tibetan Buddhist poet, wrote:

Exercise: writing an elegy

So, here's a little prompt: to write an elegy. Think of it as a poem in praise of someone or something lost. Write for a person, an animal, an opportunity, a place, a particular time. Try to find simple words, intimate words to express your love for that time, that person. And remember that part of the elegy is your own struggle to come to terms with it. Elegies often are unafraid to admit the flaws in the person. They see the wholeness of a time or a place or a person. 

So take a few minutes and write a brief elegy to something you have lost.

Moving towards the future

One quality of the elegy is this movement toward the future, toward the ordinary. Grief is a deeply altered and strange state. The point comes when we do ordinary things again, and they seem extraordinary when we begin to do them again.

The poet Marie Howe has written a number of lovely poems about grief. This is an excerpt from her poem, 'What the Living Do.'

Read 'What the Living Do' at Poets.org

Writing assignment: write your funeral poem

We are nearing the end of this unit. For homework, I invite you to write the poem that will be read at your funeral if you die this year. It could be a brief haiku. It could be a long, lyrical poem. It should express your view of the world today. What will you say if you die tomorrow?