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?