Elegiac...that's what an editor of the Missouri Review said about my poetry more than fifteen years ago. I appreciated the comment. I have been told and have seen that I like to wallow in the sentimental but elegiac poems feel cleaner, like the moment has been captured not framed in black in a wreath of woven hair as the Victorians like to frame pictures of their dear deceased.
Elegiac is from the Greek, elegia, and later the French translated it as "song of mourning" while the Greek indicated that it is a poem of lament, in particular for lost youth. And we all know how the Greeks idealized youth!
So what would a Greek poet pen about the loss of this crimson bud, never to open, but to lie, eternally, firmly, closed beneath the snow? I know what my dad would say..."Gather ye rosebuds whilst ye may!" He loved that line.
What sort of elegiac poem would you write?


