This is a tremendous sentimental education of a book – a literary adventure – and the elegies included (the volume is gravestone-thick) have been chosen with a scholarly discernment mixed with a wild-card flair by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan. This column is usually reserved for individual collections but here is an exceptional anthology that is fascinating and unignorable. I have been intermittently reading elegies out loud with my husband over a period of days and, contrary to what you may suppose, this has not been a weird, depressing or mournful activity – suitable only for longsuffering listeners – but uplifting and given rise to a host of questions.
Who is the elegy for? And who is it about? Is it, as Geoffrey Hill proposes, a song for the self? To what extent should an elegy revive a person on the page? Should it be ornamental or unadorned? And might elegies be inherently challenging: do they possess anything of the quality some funerals have – a party thrown around an absence? Motion and Regan go back to ancient Greece and to poets of the Renaissance and fold in much contemporary lamentation. Poems are alphabetically arranged so readers can speedily find their favourites, a kindly and an interesting decision because the removal of chronology makes for startling neighbours, ad hoc juxtapositions that deepen the sense of shared humanity through time. Some elegies come with jobs attached: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Felix Randal, the farrier; Thomas Hardy’s Drummer Hodge; Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Reuben Bright, a butcher; and an elegy that made me roar with laughter (not, I swear, in disrespect) by Mancunian poet Tony Connor about a useless plumber. This is a beautifully crafted poem that releases its pleasures at intervals, like a dripping tap. And there are poets on poets – sometimes rivalrous efforts that include WH Auden’s extraordinary performance of a tribute to WB Yeats (Auden’s Stop All the Clocks, is omitted – perhaps because overexposed).
