Sacks’ lone book of literary criticism is a collection of poetic case studies, in which he performs close readings on a number of English elegies. Chronologically spanning Spencer’s “Astrophel” to Yeats’ “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” Sacks picks apart his chosen poems line by line to give the reader insight into the common themes and divergences amongst the genre of English elegy. Sacks clearly states his mission in the preface, “I am trying neither to remystify language nor to sentimentalize subjectivity, but I do hope to use this study of the elegy as a perspective from which to reexamine the connections between language and the pathos of human consciousness.” For Sacks, much of the tension within the elegy is in language’s lack of ability to fully express the range and power of human emotions adequately. “Much of the elegist’s task lies in his reluctant resubmission to the constraints of language…. [Elegy gives a view of] man in tension with, rather than inertly constituted by, the language that so conditions him.” The form of elegy is replete with this tension. It shows “accommodation between the mourning self on the one hand and the very words of grief and fictions of consolation on the other.”
The definition of the form of elegy combines a poem of mortal loss and of consolation. “What Apollo or the poet pursues turns into a sign not only of his lost love but also of his very pursuit—a consoling sign that carries in itself the reminder of the loss on which it has been founded…. It is this substitutive turn or act of troping that any mourner must perform.” Mourning properly “requires a withdrawal of affection from the lost object and a subsequent reattachment of affection to some substitute for that object.” Throughout his book, Sacks sneaks in quite a lot of psychoanalysis along with his poetic criticism. He quotes Freud to reinforce this point, “No matter what fills the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.” Sacks continues, “The movement from loss to consolation thus requires a deflection of desire.” Sacks reveals the successful elegy most often will skirt at themes of damaged narcissism and ritual castration. It might even address the super-ego as a collection of the “illustrious dead.” Common motifs in the poems are a cast of mourners, images of weaving, vegetation, fertility, natural cycles of time, and the seasonal renewal of nature. “Few elegies or acts of mourning succeed without seeming to place the dead, and death itself, at some cleared distance from the living.” For the poet-mourner, the elegy is an act of freeing: from grief and rage, but also from any guilt. “It is as though some of the violence of death’s power enters man’s anger against that power. But this anger is as much a rage against man’s own susceptibility to death, hence a rage against the self.” When the task of elegy fails, the griever is stuck in his own melancholy, unable to properly perform the necessary task of mourning. Sacks summarizes, “no work of mourning can be successfully completed without positive recourse to various forms of mediation.” Within the poetic form of elegy, “repetition creates a sense of continuity, of an unbroken pattern such as one may oppose to the extreme discontinuity of death…. Repetition may itself be used to create the sense of ceremony.”
Finally, in his epilogue, Sacks lists many of the conventional elements of English elegy, “the use of the pastoral, of cropped flowers, of stellar and solar imagery, of covering the coffin or grave, of procession, of reality testing, of repetition and antiphony, of eclogue and self-surpassal.” Sacks concludes, “Since the occasion for elegy will not disappear, and since the elegist’s work of mourning itself requires repetitions and acceptances of codes and traditions, and, finally, since consolation itself comes usually in the form of acquired legacy or sense of continuity, it seems as though the elegy, of all genres, would have the strongest prospect of a continuing life…. Elegies are indeed condemned to repeat themselves and their predecessors.”
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