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The narrator proclaims grief for Adonais and calls upon the Muse Urania to wake and weep for her son, who died before fulfilling his great promise. In Rome, says the narrator, Adonais lies in his death chamber as if he were sleeping, with his flesh as yet uncorrupted. A shepherd-poet, Adonais is survived by his flock of dreams and other poetic thoughts, who mourn the one who fed them. Spring has come, but, as life returns throughout the natural world, sorrow also returns to those who know death. While worms eat corpses, flowers bloom atop the graves. The narrator questions the origin and purpose of humans, who recognize their individual mortality.

“Angle of Geese” is an elegy in six four-line stanzas. The poem presents an initial obscurity to the reader, for the subject and occasion are not immediately clear. The author evidently recognized the reader’s potential difficulty; according to Matthias Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday wrote to his friend and mentor, Yvor Winters, that he proposed adding an epigraph to the poem: “For a friend on the death of his child.”

“April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa” is occasioned by the day of poet Diane di Prima’s grandfather’s birth, and though the reference to April Fool’s Day in the title might seem to suggest a prank or joke, the poem is a serious tribute. The author apologizes for her previous unsuccessful efforts to write this tribute, but “the gathering madness” of the moment at hand makes her recognize the urgency of paying homage to her grandfather, and she sets to the task.

“On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet” is a poetic elegy that celebrates the life, while mourning the death, of Robert Levet (1705-1782), a “lay” physician who for many years lived in Samuel Johnson’s London house and tended the local poor, seldom asking a fee for his services. Johnson, the eighteenth century’s greatest man of letters, was a scholar, a moralist, and a poet of limited range but genuine abilities. When Levet died in 1782, Johnson was near the end of his own long life—a life that brought him the fame and success his talents merited, yet was filled with illness, poverty, and great personal disappointment. It is hardly surprising, then, to find Johnson compressing so much life and thought within a relatively few lines occasioned by the death of a poor, awkward man unknown to the “greater” world of art and letters.

“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter” is a short funeral poem in five quatrains. Through a series of restrained images, John Crowe Ransom transfixes the grief of the entire community over the inexplicable death of a young girl. He accomplishes this primarily by refusing to admit to the fact of death. The speaker of the poem, representing the community, merely declares perplexity at the little girl’s sudden inactivity.

In 1910, Rainer Maria Rilke, already a well-known writer and familiar figure on the European art scene, visited his friend Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at Duino, her remote and strangely beautiful castle on the coast of the Adriatic, near Trieste. He returned again to Duino in the winter of 1911 and, in one of those rare moments in the history of artistic composition, fell under a kind of aesthetic trance or spell, during which time he conceived the work that would become Duineser Elegien (1923; Duinese Elegies, 1930; better known as Duino Elegies). He would brood over the project for the next twelve years, experiencing several false starts before finishing the entire work during a brilliant explosion of creativity that took place during the month of February, 1922, while he was living in a chateau in Muzot, Switzerland. During that same month, Rilke also managed to complete the masterful Die Sonette an Orpheus (1923; Sonnets to Orpheus, 1936). In the following months, he was to see both of these masterpieces come off the press at almost the same time.

In its modern form, the elegy is a genre of poetry in which the speaker of a poem meditates on death and loss. The word “elegy” comes from the Greek word elegeia, meaning “poem/song of lament.” Elegies often memorialize specific people who have died or disastrous events that have occurred. Initially characterized by mourning, an elegiac poem typically shifts within its narrative to reflect a feeling of appreciation for the subject and, ultimately, solace. A genre of lyric poetry known for its emotional intimacy, the elegy has exerted a significant influence on poetic forms and modes throughout literary history.

As with other poems Charles Olson wrote in the 1950’s, “As the Dead Prey Upon Us” is composed in open form using a variety of stanza patterns, from long strophelike paragraphs to short, lumpy passages dense with imagery. Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay, published in 1950, sets forth his strategies for writing poetry, which include the use of the typewriter as an instrument for designing how a poem is to be read as well as for picturing the precise patterns in which a poet’s ideas form and fuse together into lyric language. Thus, a “projective” poem should be read as an arrangement of language in which the mental processes of conceiving and composing poetry are reenacted. “Closed form,” Olson argued in his essay, smoothed away the precise details of thinking in poetry and manufactured a generalizing, abstract mode in which all the details of imaginative articulation are lumped together and given an overriding and uniform rhythm of speech.