Elegy: a puzzle

Before encountering this austere and interesting text my only experience with an elegy was the lament at a funeral. After reading Elegy and spending hours wrestling with my mind to ponder all the possible meanings of elegy; the title Elegy, the poems titled Elegy and the individual elegies contained within every poem in the text. In thinking of an elegy as being sad or lamentful whilst asserting the creator of the elegy as winning a poetic victory, Levis has really achieved what he must have set out to do in the writing of these poems for Elegy. Almost every single poem in the text resonates with sadness or death or remorse yet in the individual choices Levis made in his subtle references he is asserting poetic victory and really weaving an intricate web of a poem that contains layers of meaning. This concept of the elegy as a poem that can be eliciting sad emotions or depicting negative imagery from the reader, while boasting in a manner of speaking, was very interesting and unique to me at the outset of the text. I found though as I read and tried to digest the text it to be a confusing idea leading me to tedious research of subtle ques to Greek mythology or Latin phrases, I then found it frustrating when these ques didn’t help solve the overall puzzle the poems presented they only led to more questions that I didn’t have the answers to. For certain I could ascertain meaning from each of the poems and in many cases I could identify multiple readings for the same poems, I am sure however that Levis wit has weaved into these poems layers that I do not understand and after reading the text I almost resent him for writing these poems that I feel have a hidden layer that is too well hidden for most readers. In saying that I also have the utmost respect for these poems because of that hidden layer, it gives the poems a mythical quality akin to the Greeks Levis so often references in his text. I also found that many of the poems had a tone to them to not take life or time for granted because it is short and sad etc. The fact that this text is riddled with poems that tell you not to take life for granted I found to be very ironic as the text was edited and assembled by a collegue of Levis as Levis died of a heart attack before he could finish Elegy and compile the manuscript of his poems. It almost seems as if Levis must have known he was dieing based on the tonality of many of the poems and the fact that he couldn’t have known he was going to die (it wasn’t a suicide it wasn’t a terminal disease) is to me the most interesting part of the text and I couldn’t forget the fact that the author of these poems died before they were published. Overall I found the text to be interesting and unique, I also enjoyed reading into Levis’s “poetic victory” however I still believe that the poems are overly puzzle-like and even if you solve the puzzle as far as you can, you will still be left with questions without answers.