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).
Not all obituaries involve the death of a person. There are arch curiosities included such as Jane Cave (1754-1812) writing an elegy for her maiden name before pulling herself together to drum up some rambling good wishes towards her husband (history does not relate what her despised new surname was). Ted Hughes’s Sheep cheekily baa their way in, too, but his poem, about bereft ewe and defective lamb, justifies the liberty. And then there are the death-wish poems, elegies to the self, such as Stevie Smith’s Scorpion – an eccentric masterpiece.
Part of the interest for the reader is in judging whether an elegy is moving or not. There is no mistaking Charlotte Brontë’s grief in a raw poem about Emily’s death, reliant on the comfort that her sister does not have to share the anguish her death has caused. But John Donne’s A Funeral Elegy about Elizabeth Drury, daughter to a wealthy landowner and, apparently, a paragon, is, although splendid, a commissioned grief that leaves you dry-eyed. The Native American poet Layli Long Soldier pulls off a shattering poem about the men executed by Abraham Lincoln, the Dakota 38, for their part in the Sioux uprising – as much protest as elegy.
There is genius here too: Shakespeare (obviously) but also Rainer Maria Rilke’s extraordinary Ninth Elegy, which is more a design for living than dying, and Rabbie Burns delights with his unforced brilliance. One discovery is that, against the odds, it is sometimes the telling – not only the showing – that counts. The key line in Douglas Dunn’s The Kaleidoscope tells it with a throwaway power: “Grief wrongs us so.”
The Kaleidoscope by Douglas Dunn
To climb these stairs again, bearing a tray,
Might be to find you pillowed with your books,
Your inventories listing gowns and frocks
As if preparing for a holiday.
Or, turning from the landing, I might find
My presence watched through your kaleidoscope,
A symmetry of husbands, each redesigned
In lovely forms of foresight, prayer and hope.
I climb these stairs a dozen times a day
And, by that open door, wait, looking in
At where you died. My hands become a tray
Offering me, my flesh, my soul, my skin.
Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry
For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why.
• The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of Memory, Mourning and Consolation by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan is published by Penguin (£40). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
