ELEGY ELEGY. Wordsworth wrote that poems are a place where emotions can be recollected in tranquillity and reproduced for the reader to experience. Poems also provide a more intellectual space where what troubles us can be dispassionately thought through — first by the poet, then by the reader. As in great philosophical poems, here there is…

Elegy–A Poem. An elegy is, as Edward Hirsch writes, “a poem of mortal loss and consolation.” This elegy first records the stray, important thoughts that come when the poet listens to Bach. Only at the end do we come upon the particular loss, and the consolation of possibility.