The Economic Exchange of the Elegy - Essay Example

? The Economic Exchange of the Elegy The elegy initiated as an antique Greek metrical form and is conventionally written in reaction to the passing of a person or group. Although alike in function, the elegy is distinctive from the epitaph, ode, and eulogy: the epitaph is very concise; the ode only intensifies; and the eulogy is most often written in reserved prose. The rudiments of a traditional elegy reflect three stages of loss. First, there is mourning, where the speaker voices grief and distress, then praise and respect of the romanticized dead, and finally comfort and solace. One Art Elizabeth Bishop, recognized for her discreet poetic style, discloses the confidences of her personal life through prudently fashioned metaphors.  In her villanelle, “One Art,” Bishop exposes the drive of art and the implication of poetic form.  In her poetry, Bishop often scuffles ferociously against articulating her feelings, but in her powerfully emotional villanelle, she lets her emotions to leach out and take on a poetic shape (McGrath).  In “One Art,” Bishop’s apparently spontaneous tone covers chaotic, inner emotions linking to great loss, and while the feelings beg to vent from the page, Bishop influences and limits them in the systematized form of a villanelle, molding her pain into art (Richter). At the beginning of the poem, Bishop’s tone seems calm and uncaring as she trains her readers in learning the all too essential “art of losing” (line 1).  Fascinatingly, her poetic voice takes on moralistic appearances as she desires readers to “lose something every day,” which clues at her own past experiences with loss.  Particularly, she talks about the loss of lifeless matters and ideas before probing into far more thoughtful items to lose. Nevertheless, her original yoking of keys and time fairly alarms readers early on in the poem (Richter).  She associates an object to an intellectual notion in the similar line of poetry and parts them only by a comma as she instructs readers to “Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent” (3-4).  By linking such dissimilar things, Bishop indirectly proposes that her forfeitures far surpass the sheer loss of keys or time; certainly, her deep suffering stops her from discriminating the variance between a lost item, possibly recoverable, and lost time, never recoverable (McGrath).  Besides, her recurrence of the phrase, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” helps to authenticate her thought process during the poem and persuade herself that losing becomes simpler with time and practice.  Evidently, though, the art of losing develops into something far more private and thought provoking for Bishop as the poem proceeds.  She instigates with lifeless objects and imperceptible notions and uses them as springboards for things, which become progressively more testing to lose (Richter).  In the third stanza, Bishop voices readers to “practice losing farther, losing faster: / places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel,” but her specificity opinions to her own logic of loss for people and places (7-9).  Her attitude no longer seems unserious or casual; in its place, the poem turn out to be ever more serious and private.  When Bishop writes, “None of these will bring disaster,” readers find “disaster” too strong a word when used in combination with lost keys and time (9) (McGrath).  At this point, Bishop leaves her readers inquisitive as to just what will bring about comprehensive and utter tragedy. In the fourth stanza, Bishop approves the individual kind of the poem, in explaining, “I lost my mother’s watch” (10).  The “I” conclusively materializes in the poem, linking loss after loss.  The reference to her mother, in specific, replicates an intensely felt feeling of Bishop’s, from the time when losing a emotional object of her departed mother signifies losing one of the only remaining memories of her mother.  Yet, the voice of the continually comforting survivor returns in the third line of the stanza, when Bishop once again strengthens her exhortation (McGrath).  While her emotions, along with the reader’s own thoughts, appear to build up in this stanza, Bishop stays spot-on to the poetic form of the villanelle in her rhyme scheme, reappearance of the refrain, and conclusion of lines with words rhyming with either “master” or “intent.”  The poetic make-up governs in her emotions, and Bishop reins her inner anarchy and biases it into an art.  The poet’s aptitude to order her poem conveys to her affected ability to control, or at least make sense of, her losses (McGrath). Still, Bishop’s losses seem to ever upsurge, and readers begin to query the poet’s presumed capacity to “master” her “disasters.”  She loses “two cities,” “some realms,” “two rivers,” “a continent,” and still maintains that “it wasn’t a disaster” (13-15).  Irrevocably, in the last quatrain, Bishop starts to skepticism the refrain, which the severe form of the villanelle needs.  Certainly, upon citing losing “you,” Bishop loses rather something else: her poetic influence.  The reassuring voice hesitates as she recalls “the joking voice, a gesture / I love” (15-16).  In identifying the declaration “I love” on a distinct line, Bishop highlights the words, letting them to stand alone with the thoughts they induce (Richter).  Knowingly, Bishop furthermore changes her refrain to “It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master” (17-18).  Undoubtedly, Bishop endeavors to succeed this woman, but her refrain deteriorates in this final stanza.  She confesses that losing love “may look like (Write it!) Like disaster” (19).  At the end of her poem, then, Bishop recognizes that the loss of love is far too demanding to master, and in a final effort to control the feelings breaking through the surface of the page, Bishop recaps the word “like” to pause the inevitable and most overwhelming disaster: the loss of a person still extremely loved (McGrath).  The voice of the stayer arises once more, still, in Bishop’s aggressive pitch of “Write it!” (19). Undeniably, Bishop’s villanelle prospers in recuperating her lost “realms” in founding an eternal place for her poetry in postmodern times through its adaptation of wholly mysterious losses into vast, profound beauty. Michiko’s Dead If God and love befall thru The Great Fires, so too does death, precisely the death of Gilbert's love Michiko in the early '80's. "Michiko Dead," the faultless poem of this alliance, functions much as "Older Women" does, while here Gilbert conditions the contrast straightforwardly as an extended simile (Orr BR18). The poem instigates "He manages", and the reader sees from the title just what he is handling. "He manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy . . . ." Most readers will adapt the box into a coffin as they read, even though any coffin's but a newborn's is too large to fit the simile, but Gilbert refrains. As he progresses the simile he never looks up from it, never lets go of its compactness, and thus never loses his grasp on the pomposity. The evocative narration is precise: the man first has his arms beneath the box, then as they fatigue he "moves the hands forward / hooking them on the corners, pulling the weight against / his chest." Gilbert could have, passionately and erroneously, dragged the weight against his heart--but he does not (Orr BR18). Next he moves his thumbs, ever-changing the strain to distinctive muscles. Then he "carries it on his shoulder." Then, by the time the elevated arm is numb, he "can hold it underneath again, so that / he can go without ever putting the box down." Some might claim that the last line is too forceful, but indeed it is the rational finish of a poem planned as a problem in applied science, and consequently the symbolic weight of the never-surrendered box is just right. Gilbert has again selected a cautious exhibition of "facts" to carry an overwhelming emotional understanding, and his accomplishment here rises not only from a properly chosen simile but also from his persistent refusal to let it get out of hand (Orr BR18).  Conclusion In my own personal and final analogy, I conclude that the poetic works of Bishop and Gilbert enhanced the economic exchange of an Elegy where a loss is converted to a gain. The way Bishop represented her grief in the poem related to the art of losing was quite sad and a de-motivating point for the readers, however, when she mentioned the art of losing was not a tough art to master, it gave the readers a positive aspect of her lifelong grief. Similarly Gilbert emphasized his feelings of overcoming the grief one faces from losing someone by death in a very elegant way. His emphasis on the start regarding how tough it is to absorb the feelings and in the end his abrupt and suitable finish to how such feelings must be let gone off is simply marvelous and helps the ideology of an elegy to enhance. Therefore my final analysis is that these two poems and their writers did a swell job in maintaining the tradition and norms of an elegy poem which is why their work lives on in the minds and hearts of the people. Works Cited Richter, Natasha L. "Losing and Writing: Synonymous Art Forms for Poet Elizabeth Bishop." Student Pulse. 2.1 (2010): n. page. Web. 9 Dec. 2013. McGrath, Jennifer. "An Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"." Yahoo! Voices. N.p., 10 Jun 2009. Web. 9 Dec 2013. http://voices.yahoo.com/an-analysis-elizabeth-bishops-one-art-3343892.html?cat=38. Orr, David. "Daily Devotions Jack Gilbert’s ‘Collected Poems’." New York Times 26 Oct 2012, Sunday Book Review BR18. Print. Read More